His Dark Materials: What is Lyra and Pan’s ‘Next Great Adventure’?

They agreed to ‘meet’ for an hour on the same bench in their Oxford’s Botanical Gardens every year at midday on midsummer’s day, each in their respective world, and remember one another. The finale showed a montage of these meetings as Lyra and Will grew from teenagers into their early twenties. We learned that Will became a medical student and then a surgeon and Lyra became a scholar at St Sophia’s College in Oxford, where she learned to read the alethiometer again.

Lyra had lost her ability to read the Dust-driven device after she chose experience over innocence when she and Will expressed their love for each other. Put simply, she grew up and it stopped working for her, like Wendy in Peter Pan or Susan in The Chronicles of Narnia. But unlike those two, Lyra had a route back to her girlhood ability: study. 

Lyra’s finale caption tells us that she learned to read the alethiometer at her Oxford college, which came in useful for her and Pan’s “next great adventure.” But that, teases the caption, is another story.  

Specifically, it’s the story of The Secret Commonwealth, the second in Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy. Published in 2019, it’s set a few years after the end of The Amber Spyglass and follows Lyra as a 20-year-old undergraduate who travels to the Far East. Prior to that, Pullman published the first in that trilogy La Belle Sauvage, a prequel set 11 years before the His Dark Materials trilogy starts and which tells the story of how Lyra was put in the care of Jordan College as an infant. A third book in the trilogy is currently being written.

Promisingly for fans, His Dark Materials production company Bad Wolf has repeatedly indicated that they would love to adapt The Book of Dust trilogy. Speaking to radiotimes.com at the Season 2 launch, Executive Producer Jane Tranter said this:

“We’d be very excited! Very excited. What could be better? La Belle Sauvage has got Lyra as a baby, and gives some of Asriel and Coulter’s backstory, and some of Lyra’s origin story. And The Secret Commonwealth is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I just don’t think there is a better study of depression, in some ways, in a fantasy landscape. It’s the most exciting story but, like everything Philip does, it has many levels to it,” she added. “And it’s an extraordinary piece… so huge and ambitious. But if anyone ever gave us the opportunity to do it, we’d be there.”