Lyra’s Oxford

Short story revisiting Philip Pullman’s reimagined Oxford of “His Dark Materials”

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently, I was struggling to meet my 2018 Goodreads challenge goal of 80 books, so I was scouring my bookshelves trying to find some shorter books and this one caught my eye. I read the first book in the author’s new series relatively recently and I knew that some of the same characters featured in this one, so I thought I’d dip into a bit of world-building and check it out.

“Lyra’s Oxford” by Philip Pullman is a short book set two years after the events of his series “His Dark Materials“. The book includes a short story called Lyra and the Birds as well as a number of tidbits and pieces of paraphernalia from the Oxford of Lyra’s World. Lyra and the Birds is a whirlwind chase for Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon among the many colleges of the city while following a lost witch’s daemon.

If you’re a huge fan of the series, this is a fun little vacation back into the world of daemons, mysteries and Lyra’s stomping ground. I really enjoyed the fold out map in the centre, and the other fictional documents in the book. I also really enjoyed an older Lyra, juggling studies and socialising but also with the same sense of adventure.

While I enjoyed a lot about this, I wasn’t enormously sold on the plot. Lyra and Pan race around Oxford and while it is certainly an exercise in worldbuilding, and leaves some questions unanswered, I didn’t really feel like as a self-contained story there was much in the way of plot and character development. I think I preferred his other companion book “Once Upon a Time in the North”, a rollicking story about the inimitable Lee Scoresby and his daemon Hester.

A fun little book for fans of “His Dark Materials”, but not quite as satisfying as the novels.

Lyra’s Oxford