Lyra’s Oxford

Philip Pullman's Lyra's Oxford is a short return to Lyra's world for 11 year olds, and it very much helps to have been there before.

What happens

Lyra is older here. She has a key to the roof of the Lodge Tower at Jordan College, handed over by the Porter because he's too old to climb up and check the stonework himself. She lies flat on the lead where nobody can see her, and reads.

Pantalaimon is a pine marten now, which tells you something on its own.

They're up there one evening watching the starlings rise out of the Botanic Garden in their thousands when something snags in the flock. A bird is being mobbed. Except it isn't a bird.

It's a witch's daemon, alone, with no witch anywhere in sight. Lyra hauls open the trapdoor and gets him inside before anyone in the street below looks up.

He needs her help to find an alchemist in Jericho.

That's the story. One evening, one city, and it's over quickly. What it's really doing is showing you Lyra a couple of years on, cleverer, more careful, and still entirely incapable of leaving a mystery alone.

The pleasure is the Oxford of it. Storks nesting on St Michael's Tower that she keeps trying to lure across to Jordan with a platform she nailed together herself. The canal path past the ironworks. A pantry window with a loose latch, because she still has Latin homework waiting for her.

Be clear with yourself about what you're picking up, though. This is a slim companion piece and not a novel. It assumes you already know who Lyra is, what a daemon is and that there has been a war. A reader coming to it cold will follow the plot and miss most of the point of it.

And it isn't a gentle little extra either. Someone in it means to kill Lyra, there's a knife, and the ending is violent and plainly described. If your reader found the later books in the sequence heavy going, this will be heavy going too.

What to read next

If they haven't met her yet, start where she started. Northern Lights opens with Lyra sneaking into a Retiring Room at Jordan College where girls are absolutely not allowed, with Pantalaimon whispering at her to behave herself, and everything else in her life comes out of what she overhears in there.