Reading: The Secret Commonwealth
Nov. 24th, 2019 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartHaving been absolutely blown away by La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, I had high hopes for the second, The Secret Commonwealth; unfortunately, while there was a lot I liked about it I didn't feel the book quite lived up to them.
The Secret Commonwealth is set twenty years after La Belle Sauvage, and eight or nine years after the end of The Amber Spyglass. Lyra is now a student at one of the women's colleges in Oxford, and, like many students, has developed a performative intellectualism (in her case, inspired by the work of two popular nihilist philosophers, one of whom denies the existence of anything beyond the concrete and the other of whom asserts that there is no such thing as truth) which alienates her from the people she was once close to, in particular her daemon, Pantalaimon. However, she is also still a person of interest to the Magisterium, whose power in Lyra's world hasn't diminished as a result of the effects of His Dark Materials, and when Pantalaimon witnesses a murder he and Lyra, along with Malcolm Polstead from La Belle Sauvage, now an Oxford don, find themselves pulled into a web of dangerous intrigues all centred around a mysterious building in the desert of central Asia, the source of a special kind of rose whose oil has many special properties, including granting users the ability to see Dust. Travelling separately, Lyra, Pan and Malcolm all find themselves drawn eastwards to a volatile and dangerous Middle East and the start of the Silk Road that will take them to the building in the desert. Their points of view are interspersed with the narratives of key figures in the Magisterium, particularly the scheming Marcel Delamare and the alethiometer-reader Olivier Bonneville, son of Gerard Bonneville from La Belle Sauvage.
The Secret Commonwealth is a huge, slightly sprawling novel, quickly moving beyond Oxford to encompass a much wider world. It's also very much the second volume of a trilogy; where La Belle Sauvage was self-contained, after 700 pages this still really only felt like half a novel; all set-up with the resolution yet to come. There were some interesting ideas about the importance of imagination and acknowledging the possibility of the numinous, and the equal dangers of fanatical religiosity and fanatical scepticism, and I loved the amazing, vivid, colourful world Pullman has created, a Europe that feels modern and yet also evokes the pre-WW2 Europe of Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Buchan. Although it's clearly aimed at adults, rather than children (you can tell that, because people say "fuck" on a regular basis), Pullman hasn't quite managed to shake the children's-writer habit of explanation, and there's also a lot of exposition conveyed by scenes where one of the point of view characters meets someone who tells them some important information (usually in a cafe. There are a lot of cafes in this book). There are also a lot of slightly clunky parallels between Lyra's world and our world (refugees drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe; religious fanatics threatening the stablity in the Middle East). The thing I most disliked, though, was Pullman's depiction of Lyra as a young adult, and in particular his attempts to depict a twenty-year-old woman's sexuality, which felt very much like an older man's imagined version of what a twenty-year-old woman's sexuality would be like and which I have to say I found a bit skeevy; even more skeevy was the suggestion that a character could reason that his attraction to a woman ten years younger than him, who he'd known since she was a child, was suddenly OK because she was legally an adult now, and I am slightly concerned that this is being set up as the grand romance subplot of the trilogy.
Overall, while I did enjoy The Secret Commonwealth, I didn't love it as I'd hoped I would. I'm still eagerly awaiting the third book, though.
The Secret Commonwealth is set twenty years after La Belle Sauvage, and eight or nine years after the end of The Amber Spyglass. Lyra is now a student at one of the women's colleges in Oxford, and, like many students, has developed a performative intellectualism (in her case, inspired by the work of two popular nihilist philosophers, one of whom denies the existence of anything beyond the concrete and the other of whom asserts that there is no such thing as truth) which alienates her from the people she was once close to, in particular her daemon, Pantalaimon. However, she is also still a person of interest to the Magisterium, whose power in Lyra's world hasn't diminished as a result of the effects of His Dark Materials, and when Pantalaimon witnesses a murder he and Lyra, along with Malcolm Polstead from La Belle Sauvage, now an Oxford don, find themselves pulled into a web of dangerous intrigues all centred around a mysterious building in the desert of central Asia, the source of a special kind of rose whose oil has many special properties, including granting users the ability to see Dust. Travelling separately, Lyra, Pan and Malcolm all find themselves drawn eastwards to a volatile and dangerous Middle East and the start of the Silk Road that will take them to the building in the desert. Their points of view are interspersed with the narratives of key figures in the Magisterium, particularly the scheming Marcel Delamare and the alethiometer-reader Olivier Bonneville, son of Gerard Bonneville from La Belle Sauvage.
The Secret Commonwealth is a huge, slightly sprawling novel, quickly moving beyond Oxford to encompass a much wider world. It's also very much the second volume of a trilogy; where La Belle Sauvage was self-contained, after 700 pages this still really only felt like half a novel; all set-up with the resolution yet to come. There were some interesting ideas about the importance of imagination and acknowledging the possibility of the numinous, and the equal dangers of fanatical religiosity and fanatical scepticism, and I loved the amazing, vivid, colourful world Pullman has created, a Europe that feels modern and yet also evokes the pre-WW2 Europe of Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Buchan. Although it's clearly aimed at adults, rather than children (you can tell that, because people say "fuck" on a regular basis), Pullman hasn't quite managed to shake the children's-writer habit of explanation, and there's also a lot of exposition conveyed by scenes where one of the point of view characters meets someone who tells them some important information (usually in a cafe. There are a lot of cafes in this book). There are also a lot of slightly clunky parallels between Lyra's world and our world (refugees drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe; religious fanatics threatening the stablity in the Middle East). The thing I most disliked, though, was Pullman's depiction of Lyra as a young adult, and in particular his attempts to depict a twenty-year-old woman's sexuality, which felt very much like an older man's imagined version of what a twenty-year-old woman's sexuality would be like and which I have to say I found a bit skeevy; even more skeevy was the suggestion that a character could reason that his attraction to a woman ten years younger than him, who he'd known since she was a child, was suddenly OK because she was legally an adult now, and I am slightly concerned that this is being set up as the grand romance subplot of the trilogy.
Overall, while I did enjoy The Secret Commonwealth, I didn't love it as I'd hoped I would. I'm still eagerly awaiting the third book, though.
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Date: 2019-11-26 08:29 pm (UTC)