Putting Away Childish Things

“The universal skepticism she’d learnt … made her sternly reject the world of dreams and occult significances. They were childish things, worthless rubbish.” 

So says Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in his 2019 follow-up novel The Secret Commonwealth.^[1] Part of a sequel trilogy known as The Book of Dust, The Secret Commonwealth reintroduced readers to a very different Lyra than the one they’d first gotten to know in The Golden Compass, published in 1995.

In The Golden Compass, Lyra is a brash child who makes up elaborate stories on the spot, using her “silver tongue” and moxie to get herself and her friends out of a series of harrowing situations. Over the course of the original trilogy, which ended with The Amber Spyglass in 2000, Lyra passed through the crucible of adolescence in the most dramatic way possible: along with her friend Will, she traveled through countless other worlds, freed the trapped souls in the world of the dead, and killed God. An enormously ambitious book, The Amber Spyglass became the first and, to date, only novel for children to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. 

The Secret Commonwealth, the second installment in The Book of Dust, was published 19 years after The Amber Spyglass. Like the children who grew up reading about her adventures as His Dark Materials was published, Lyra is now a grown-up. In The Golden Compass, she scrambled around on the roofs of Oxford’s colleges as a ward; now, she’s a student herself. She’s also older and more jaded, and has come under the sway of influential philosophers who question the existence of the supernatural forces she encountered as a young person. As she reflects, “She thought she’d been certain about things when she came back from the north, but the things she’d learnt during her adventures there seemed so far away now; all that remained was a scatter of vivid impressions.” 

The most elemental supernatural component of Pullman’s world is the existence of daemons, externalized souls that take the form of animals like Lyra’s beloved Pan, who takes the form of a pine marten. It’s a mark of how far Lyra has traveled from her younger self that she even goes so far as to consider the work of a philosopher who insists that daemons don’t exist. Appalled by Lyra’s increasing cynicism, Pan rebels and flees to “find [Lyra’s] imagination.” In the wake of his disappearance, Lyra realizes that “exalt[ing] reason” has led to “the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.” In The Secret Commonwealth and the final book in the new trilogy, The Rose Field, which was released late last year, Lyra sets out to reunite with Pan and to find her imagination again. But these quests won’t be easy.

Meeting Lyra as a college student is a jarring experience. As a child, I read and adored His Dark Materials. Unlike some writers for children, Pullman never felt like he was talking down to me as a reader. Equally important, he was willing to deal with serious topics, like religion and death. But most of all, I was drawn to Lyra. She was haughty, like her noble father, and I could be haughty (and obnoxious), too—I was supremely confident in my own smarts and creativity. But I was also shy, and meeting other kids made me nervous. Lyra, who charmed nearly everyone she met and could walk into any situation and make up a story that was not only believable but got her and her friends out of trouble, amazed me. I wanted to be like her.

Lyra isn’t infallible in His Dark Materials: she experiences fear, grief, and moments of failure, as when she inadvertently leads her friend Roger to her father in The Golden Compass, only for her father to kill Roger in order to use his life energy to open up a pathway to another world. But after suffering these failures or moments of terror throughout the original trilogy, she rallies. In The Book of Dust, by contrast, Lyra doubts herself and is skeptical about how the world works. It’s startling to read these passages and even more distressing to read about her experiencing profound unhappiness as an adult, even if those experiences aren’t unusual for adults in the real world—especially adults who, like Lyra, have lived through serious childhood trauma.