No need for the show creators to worry about having to come up with their own ending themselves.

In other words, readers finally get to see Lyra as a young adult!

), andThe Constant Deceiverby Simon Talbot, a philosophical tract positing that there is no objective truth.

“My youth, my adolescence and early manhood, was tremendously influenced by the books I was reading.

Rationality is a very good servant, but a bad master, to use the old expression.”

WhileHis Dark Materialsspanned multiple parallel worlds,The Secret Commonwealthdives deep on this one in particular.

“Geneva today is a large city which does have one big business going on, which is finance.

So I wasn’t straying too far from reality.

I chose Geneva of course because it was one of the centers for Protestantism in the Reformation.

The whole history of it is set out in bits and pieces throughout.

It’s Puritans, who were a bloody nuisance wherever they turned up.

Standing in contrast is the titular organization, the secret commonwealth.

Always what i’m striving towards is a vision of totality rather than partiality.

By that I think of a kind of middle way, between extremes of any sort.

We’ll see more of what that means in the third book.”

Lyra later makes her way to Constantinople, which marks the series' first visit to the Middle East.

But they do share important characteristics most notably, a refugee crisis brought on by political and social unrest.

“The work of many Middle Eastern writers is astonishing.

I’m currently reading this book calledNo Friend but the Mountainsby Behrouz Boochani.

Australians being Australians, they imprisoned him with hundreds of others on this dreadful prison camp island.

It’s a true account of what happened and the way he’s forced into captivity.

It’s an endlessly fascinating, vital topic that we should look at.

I found this was a way of looking at it from another angle.

I didn’t intend to make this part of the story, it just insisted on being there.”

The source of the unrest in Lyra’s Middle East has to do with roses.

It’s not just any kind of rose, though.

That strangely beautiful image haunts several characters, including Lyra, throughout the book.

It’s that region, the hidden place that’s hard to reach and out of sight.

That was what I started with: What goes on there?"

Dust is key to Pullman’s project here, dating back toHis Dark Materials.

No wonder the Magisterium is so eager to get its hands on these roses before anyone else.

“It’s a kind of analogy of consciousness,” Pullman says.

They see knowledge as a great corruption of innocence.

This brings us onto what consciousness is.

Nobody has discovered it yet!

There are a number of different ideas.

In Lyra’s world, it exists in this special rose oil.

These coincidences are no accident, says Pullman.

“Roses have been with me for some time,” Pullman says.

It features two roses tied together with a ribbon, but the blossoms are looking in different directions.

So roses were always a presence in my mind, somehow, for this story.

“Other links are nice to be able to put in,” Pullman says.

That was an act of fission if you like, and this is an act of fusion.

They both involve destruction and things developing out of destruction.

The final movement will refer back to the second theme in the first movement, and so on.

This is how you make something large that has a coherence."

Even so, “It will lead to a resolution, a revelation, or some other thing.

The themes will be worked out.

It will be nice to end it, as Mozart’s Symphony No.

1, ending with a complicated fugue that involves the entire orchestra.”

The Secret Commonwealthis available now where books are sold.