Meet Soren, the Owl of the Broken Law

Lyra Vale's familiar. A small barred owl who is, technically, a being of probability. Not alive in the ordinary sense — and that, the novel insists, is the whole point.

Soren is the second character readers meet in The Chronowarden, after Lyra herself. He is a small barred owl who arrives at the foot of her bed in Chapter One, and who, the narrator notes plainly, was not, in the ordinary sense, alive. He is a Child of the Broken Law — a being of probability that took owl-shape because owl-shape was a useful shape to wear in the company of a young Chronowarden. He has been with Lyra since her initiation. He will be with her at her death.

How he communicates

Two ways, both small.

The first is blinks. One blink for yes. Two blinks for worse than before. The novel uses this constantly. Lyra asks the question; Soren blinks; the reader knows the answer before Lyra has decided what to do with it. It is the cleanest dialogue technique in the book.

The second is what Lyra calls the voice that wasn't a voice — a silent communication inside her own attention that arrives, recognisable, in his cadence. He uses it sparingly. When he uses it, it is usually to count, or to scout, or to point.

What he does

Three working jobs, across the book.

One: he counts. The seals on the Forge of Souls. The fragments in Saturn's rings. The Hollow Travelers on the field. Lyra is the one who acts; Soren is the one who tallies. The tallying matters because Lyra, at twenty-seven, is still the kind of warden who can lose count when she is afraid.

Two: he scouts. He goes ahead of her into the lower densities, returns with what he has seen. In Vienna 1923 he is a fist-sized grey owl. In the apothecary's back room he is an enamel brooch with garnet eyes, sitting on a shelf, watching. On Saturn he is a small white owl. The form shifts to fit the room.

Three: he closes her eyes. The book promises this directly, near the end: when Lyra dies, on the Tuesday afternoon in October in her seventy-third year, in the small white room, alone — Soren will close her eyes. This is the promise that runs underneath the entire novel. The reader understands, eventually, that the familiar's whole work is not the present moment but the very last one.

He is the figure we wrote for the part of the working life that is not the practitioner herself — the quiet, attentive, not-entirely-explicable witness that has been keeping count the whole time.

What he is not

He is not Lyra's pet. He is not her conscience. He is not symbolic. He is, in the novel's careful framing, a particular kind of being, taking a particular kind of shape, doing a particular kind of work alongside a particular kind of warden. The owl form is convenient. The being underneath the form is what is actually doing the keeping.

Working practitioners who have ever felt the small unexplainable companionship of a household familiar — the cat that arrived at a hard year and stayed, the dog that knew, the ceramic owl on the mantle that has been turned slightly each season — will recognise what the novel is depicting. Familiars are not pets. They are working partners. Soren is the working partner of The Chronowarden, named in detail because the lineage deserves to have one of its familiars named in detail.