This short story allows readers one more glimpse of Lyra, two years further on and, to her teachers and fellow pupils, now a law-abiding and hard-working schoolgirl. She has changed in other ways too, with her cheerfully ungrammatical spoken English now a thing of the past. Since parting from Will, ‘the slightest thing had the power to move her to pity and distress’. No longer the tough heroine of former times, she continuously feels ‘as if her heart were bruised for ever’.
This ready sympathy leads her into danger when she is persuaded by a witch’s dæmon to follow him into the back streets of Oxford on an apparent errand of mercy. When she and her faithful Pan arrive at their chosen destination, she is nearly murdered. She then meets the mysterious Mr Makepeace, described by others as an alchemist but in fact someone working on a vitally important personal mission. Although he refuses to tell Lyra what this is, he does say that she may find out more in time. It looks as if the ground is being set here for further books in the future. Or as Pullman puts in in his preface: ‘This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven’t appeared yet. It’s hard to tell.’
Designed to look like a bundle of documents that could have come from another world, like our own in some ways but different in others, Lyra’s Oxford also includes some spoof advertisements and postcards as well as a pull-out map of the city. On it, some pretend handwriting in brown ink shows where Mary Malone lives and points the way to the avenue of hornbeam trees where Will first spotted the near-invisible window through which he could pass into Lyra’s Oxford. Depictions on the map of steam trains and a Zeppelin station remind readers and the odd unaware tourist that this is not the real Oxford, however similar some of the buildings and the general topography.
But, as always with Pullman, there is a serious point beyond his love of pastiche. Lyra insists twice in this story that everything always means something, and it is up to everyone to find personal significance in the day-to-day details of their ordinary existence. In this story, for example, Lyra and Pan conclude after the event that they were saved by the flocks of birds that attacked the witch’s dæmon. While the birds were trying to warn them of impending danger, the city itself also seemed to be giving them its protection. Or at least that is what it felt like, and, as Pullman makes clear, our feelings about things always become part of the meaning we attach to them.
Yet, if everything does indeed mean something, it can still be very difficult to work out exactly what this might be at the time. It is easier instead to look back to the past to understand how exactly what then took place might influence the present. But what if the workings of the universe were so organised that our own futures might also be influencing the choices we make in our daily lives? How could any human expect to be let in to this particular secret? Perhaps Mr Makepeace and his attempts to discover the key to the whole cosmos will one day come up with an answer.
In his preface to Lyra’s Oxford, we have already seen Pullman writing how it is never easy to tell what may or may not turn out to be important in the course of any particular story. All he can do is narrate the plot as it appears to him at the moment; other meanings, perhaps presently obscured, may become clearer with the passage of time. As in fiction, so also in life. Readers too, by implication, may never be entirely sure about what exactly is happening to them in their daily existence and why. Like novelists, they too must search for their own key to understanding as much as they can, always remembering that what may sometimes look unimportant now could turn out to be far more significant in the long run.