Highly-Anticipated Book Review: "The Secret Commonwealth" by Philip Pullman
Images from the “Myriorama” mix-and-match card game, for which one of the chapters of The Secret Commonwealth is named.
Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass was the first book I ever stayed up all night to read so you know I had to start reading the latest book in the continuation series the day it came out. I happened to have a cross-country flight that day, so I sweet-talked my local indie bookstore into letting me pick up a copy early — I think Lyra Silvertongue would approve. I was good, though: I didn’t crack it open till I was on my flight on the morning of October 3, and I sped through the second half of it on the return flight home on October 6.
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Lyra and Malcolm are not children anymore,” Philip Pullman thunders in his author’s note to The Secret Commonwealth, and neither are we, those of us who grew up with the original
His Dark Materials
trilogy. Despite being published by a young-readers’ imprint, this is the most grown-up and gritty book yet in the series. All of its principal characters are adults. Real-world concerns like the refugee crisis intrude into Lyra’s fantastical alternate world. Though no one really mentions it, God is dead. And Lyra, now 20 years old, spends the book in a state of existential alienation, made literal via her estrangement from her daemon Pantalaimon.
Pullman blames Lyra’s unhappiness on her infatuation with trendy works of fiction and philosophy that promote nihilism and materialism. (He makes them sound like a cross between Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand.) It’s like he’s worried that we millennials—who are turning away from organized religion at an unprecedented rate—took the atheistic message of His Dark Materials a little too much to heart. Pullman believes that religion is dangerous and repressive… but so is the hyper-rational “New Atheism” of Dawkins and the like. In abandoning religion, have we also abandoned myth and folklore and imagination, and therefore made ourselves even worse off? How can we renew our faith in the “secret commonwealth” of everything that lies beyond the rational? How can we overcome our skepticism and disbelief? (Well, okay: it took a big leap of faith for me to believe that a girl who went on such fabulous adventures in the original trilogy, who met angels and crossed universes and literally killed God, would fall under the sway of a radical skeptic who argues that daemons don’t exist.)
Being an atheist who loves fantasy is just one of the difficult needles that Pullman must thread here. Another is the matter of Lyra’s adult sexuality. At the end of
The Amber Spyglass
, Lyra and Will’s love literally saved the multiverse, but then they were forced to separate forever. So what’s a sequel-author to do? If Lyra pursues other relationships, many readers will dislike her for being unfaithful to Will’s memory; if Lyra does remain faithful to Will, it could send unhealthy messages to younger members of the audience (e.g. “it’s impossible to move on from your first love”). At first, I was thrilled at the hints that Lyra has had a fling with a handsome young man from Oxford—in a YA-appropriate way, the book suggests that sex can be pleasurable and worthwhile even if your partner is not your True Love. But I’m less enthused at how the series seems to be setting Lyra up for an eventual happy ending with Malcolm Polstead, mostly via emphasizing the similarities between Malcolm and Will. Somehow this seems like the least satisfying option of all: Lyra shouldn’t have to remain celibate forever, but neither should she end up with Will 2.0. Moreover, I don’t automatically think it’s gross that a 31-year-old male professor would be attracted to a 20-year-old female student… until I remember that Malcolm has known Lyra since she was a baby and even changed her diapers.
The Secret Commonwealth offered me a lot to think about in terms of philosophy, theology, and how fierce and fearless young girls can become anxious and alienated young women. Pullman keeps introducing new ideas about daemons that complicate our previous understanding of them. (It would almost make more sense for this trilogy to be called “The Book of Daemons” rather than “The Book of Dust.”) But for all its love of myth and storytelling, I’m not sure how successful it is as a story. As other reviewers have noted, it ends on a cliffhanger and without any note of emotional release or catharsis. The second half of the book is one long triple-picaresque, alternating between Lyra, Malcolm, and Pan as they go on separate journeys throughout Europe and the Near East. So many new characters are introduced that it can be unclear which of them are really meaningful and which of them are just there to play cameo roles in a chapter or two. I know that some people dislike His Dark Materials because they feel like Pullman’s philosophy overshadows and contorts the narrative, and I never felt that way about the original trilogy, but unfortunately, that was kind of my experience of The Secret Commonwealth.
Bonus: While writing this review, I discovered this 2014 interview with Pullman in which he decries pop-science writers who use “the formula ‘X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.’” A very similar passage appears in The Secret Commonwealth and I think the article as a whole sheds interesting light on Pullman’s beliefs.
Bonus II: I illustrated this post with a picture of the “Myriorama” cards because I thought it’d be more interesting and unexpected than a picture of the book cover or of Pullman, and because I nearly shouted out loud when I got to that chapter of the book. Last November, my friend Stuart (who might be some kind of witch, or at least a Bard) showed up to my Friendsgiving bearing wine, stuffing, and his Myriorama deck. The other guests and I had never seen such a thing before, and we were enthralled. Now, a big theme of The Secret Commonwealth, and of the Myriorama storytelling deck, is unexpected but meaningful connections, and it does feel meaningful that one of my most magical friends and one of my favorite fantasy authors are the only two people I’ve ever seen reference the Myriorama. I just bought my own copy, and you can too, here.