The Secret Commonwealth

Did You Know?

• The title comes from a 17th-century book by Scottish clergyman Robert Kirk about supernatural creatures.
• Three character names in the novel are those of real people: Bud Schlesinger, Alison Wetherfield, and Nur Huda el-Wahabi.
• Nur Huda el-Wahabi was a victim of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

Plot

Lyra Silvertongue is a student at St Sophia’s College, Oxford, but she still sleeps and eats at Jordan College. Malcolm Polstead, the man who saved her as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, now works as a don. Lyra has become fascinated by two writers: Simon Talbot, a philosopher who claims that reason is everything and that dæmons are just a trick of the mind, and Gottfried Brande, a novelist who rejects anything that isn’t pure logic. Her dæmon, Pantalaimon, hates both of them.

One night, Pan sees a man get killed. A ticket in the dead man’s wallet leads them to a backpack with a journal and an address book. The victim is a botanist named Roderick Hassall. The journal belongs to his colleague Dr Strauss, who had been studying a rose whose oil is linked to Dust.

Strauss hides this from the Magisterium because they would call the rose industry heretical. Unknown raiders from the mountains have been attacking the rose estates, so Strauss and Hassall head there. The desert of Karamakan, where the rose business is based, forces every visitor to leave their dæmon behind. Strauss asks how people get reunited and hears about a place called the Blue Hotel, where separated dæmons live.

The group reaches a huge red building, heavily guarded. The price to enter is a life. Strauss goes in. Hassall never sees him again and goes home alone with Strauss’s journal.

The new master of Jordan College, a pharmaceutical executive, tells Lyra she has to vacate her rooms. Agents from the Magisterium tear the place apart but miss the backpack’s contents. Lyra and Pantalaimon have a terrible fight. Pan says the books Lyra reads have made her blind to the non-rational parts of life.

Lyra angrily dismisses emotion. Pan vanishes, leaving a note: “Gone to look for your imagination.” Heartbroken, Lyra thinks Pan might go to the Blue Hotel and decides to follow. The gyptians help her get out of the country safely.

Meanwhile, Malcolm is sent to Karamakan as a spy for the Oakley Street secret service. Marcel Delamare, Lyra’s uncle and a powerful Magisterium cardinal, finds out that rose oil lets people see Dust. He gets a young alethiometrist, Olivier Bonneville, to track Lyra, but Bonneville ignores orders and goes off on his own.