Clara’s Verdict
Philip Pullman returning to Lyra Belacqua is one of modern literature’s great pleasures, and The Secret Commonwealth – the second volume of The Book of Dust, shortlisted for Audiobook of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards – is a darker, stranger, more adult book than anything in His Dark Materials. It asks harder questions and provides fewer comforting answers. Michael Sheen’s narration, which won Best Solo Narration at the New York Festival Radio Awards, elevates the experience further. This is how audiobook production should work: a great book, a great narrator, rendered at the highest level of craft.
I’ll admit I came to this one with some apprehension. Lyra at twenty is necessarily different from Lyra at twelve, and not every reader will welcome the change. But Pullman is too honest a writer to have given us a comfortable sequel.
About the Audiobook
Twenty years have passed since the events of La Belle Sauvage, and nearly ten since the conclusion of His Dark Materials. Lyra Silvertongue is now twenty years old, studying at Oxford, and deeply, troublingly estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon. The rift between them – caused by Lyra’s growing embrace of rationalism and scepticism, her rejection of imagination as a way of knowing – is the novel’s central philosophical engine. Pullman is asking serious questions about what it means to be a fully integrated self, and about what we lose when we decide that only measurable things are real.
The plot is properly epic. Lyra is drawn into a conspiracy involving the Magisterium, a mysterious substance that may be connected to Dust, and a city in Central Asia haunted by something that defies rational explanation. Malcolm – the boy with the boat from La Belle Sauvage, now an academic with his own complicated history – has his own parallel journey, and the gradual convergence of their paths is handled with Pullman’s characteristic narrative patience. The book ends on a cliff-hanger that will infuriate some readers and exhilarate others. Pullman earns it.
The Narration
Michael Sheen gives a performance that deserves every award it received. The challenge here is immense: an enormous cast spanning multiple countries, cultures, and ages; rapid shifts between high adventure, philosophical debate, and intimate emotional crisis; and a central character – Lyra – who is at once familiar from previous books and genuinely changed. Sheen meets every demand. His Lyra is the right kind of different – recognisable but no longer a child, carrying her contradictions with the slightly damaged dignity of a person who has survived something enormous. The AudioFile review quoted in the book’s own promotional material is not wrong: when situations become fraught, Sheen ramps up the tension exquisitely.
What Readers Say
A 4.6 rating from eighteen listeners is a modest sample, but the responses are thoughtful. UK readers have generally been generous: one described it as “a successfully more adult version of His Dark Materials, which are some of my favourite books,” acknowledging that Lyra’s transformation into “an indecisive and unimaginative adult plagued by self doubt” was initially hard to accept but ultimately felt truthful. Another simply noted that “Pullman is amazing,” which covers a great deal of ground. A more measured assessment scored it 4.5, praising the twenty-year-old Lyra, the separate journeys of Lyra and Malcolm, and the journey from Oxford to Asia as properly epic in scope.
Who Should Listen?
You should read His Dark Materials first – this is non-negotiable. Without knowing who Lyra was, you cannot appreciate who she has become, and the emotional weight of her estrangement from Pantalaimon depends entirely on our shared history with them both. Having read La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume One) will also help, though it is not as strictly necessary. This is adult literary fantasy at its most ambitious – Pullman is not trying to recreate the experience of the first trilogy but to extend and complicate it. Listeners who want that complication will be richly rewarded.
Listen to Michael Sheen’s award-winning performance on Audible UK.
