The Book of Dust Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealth

Having waded through Phillip Pullman’s over-saturated His Dark Materials prequel, it’s time to steer our canoe onto the main event: The Secret Commonwealth, an honest-to-Authority sequel to the original trilogy. Will it fare better than La Belle Sauvage, or capsize? Will I be able to fit any more puns into this opening paragraph?

The answer to the last question is no, but you’ll need to read on for the rest.

Picking up eight years after the end of The Amber Spyglass and twenty years after La Belle Sauvage, The Secret Commonwealth finds Lyra living the student life at St. Sophia’s College. A rift has grown between her and Pantalaimon, driven partially by the unaddressed trauma of their seperation in the world of the dead and partially by some curious changes in Lyra’s outlook on life, and it’s threatening to widen into mutual hatred on both sides.

During a night-time jaunt to get some distance, Pan witnesses a murder; the ensuing investigation conducted by him and Lyra sends them—alongside Malcolm of La Belle Sauvage fame and his contacts in the anti-Magisterium intelligence apperatus—chasing after a mystery that leads them east, into central Asia, towards a cursed city and a species of wild rose that holds to key to unlocking the final secrets of Dust. Along the way they slowly become aware of the titular secret commonwealth, the fairy-like entities that Malcolm and baby Lyra first encountered during the great flood.

If that plot synopsis sounded more interesting and focused than “a boy interacts with Lyra for a bit and there’s vague spy stuff and then a flood happens”, that’s because it is. The Secret Commonwealth is an immediately more propulsive and exciting yarn, driven by a more active set of protagonists who have more clearly-defined stakes in the story. Many of La Belle Sauvage’s problems are still very much in evidence—there’s still way too much extraneous dialogue and the whole thing feels like it could easily lose a few chapters—but it’s much faster and more exciting than its predecessor. An early scene has Malcolm and six other people gather in a room for a cordial chat about the plot, which made me groan out loud, this being the sort of dull nonsense that happened all the time in La Belle Sauvage; but before the first person is finished speaking some Magisterium agents interrupt the meeting, the polite talk is replaced with exciting espionage hijinks and most of the new characters introduced for the scene exit the story without even opening their mouths. The whole thing is such a perfect refutation of La Belle Sauvage that I’d almost believe it’s deliberate self-parody…except if Pullman had that much self-awareness, La Belle Sauvage wouldn’t exist in its current form.

In hindsight, it’s very clear that La Belle Sauvage was just an extended prologue to this and the third Book of Dust volume; I’d bet money that in the original conception of the project as one big book, it was going to be a short story or two instead of a complete novel. Whereas Pullman seemed to be trying to get through it as quickly as possible, this seems to be the story he was interested in telling the whole time. And more than that, the plot on offer here is just more fun, filled with more exciting incidents and events: an exploding airship here, a church figurehead getting violently hacked to bits by assassins there, an internal Magisterium coup, religiously-motivated chaos and unrest sweeping o’er the land…it’s a far more compelling read all round.

Not that it doesn’t hit some significant snags along the way (much as a canoe might be snagged by tree branches, one might propose). This is where Pullman has to circle back and link all the stuff from La Belle Sauvage into the story of the original trilogy without it coming off like a huge retcon, and to be fair he manages it better than some authors probably would have. One minor character from Northern Lights is “revealed” to have actually been La Belle Sauvage’s co-protagonist in a way that’s fairly convincing, and Malcolm’s status as a professor who’s spent much of the intervening time doing field work in far-flung places means that there doesn’t need to be an explanation for why he never showed up in the first three books.

However, in other ways the book can’t escape the fact that it is, in fact, just a huge retcon in order to insert plot points into the original trilogy that weren’t actually there. The most glaring example is the question of why Malcom, Alice, the Master of Oxford, Lord Asriel and a whole bunch of other people who were involved in the events of La Belle Sauvage never told Lyra about any of it in the twenty years that have passed since; Pullman can’t come up with anything beyond “it was just never the right time”, which is what you say to your partner when you’re revealing that you used to date their best friend or something (assuming both of you are in a rom-com) and not your excuse for why you never told your sort-of ward that she drank fairy milk while surviving an apocalyptic flood (which, now that I think about it, really should have left a bigger cultural impact on the region).

Similarly, we’re supposed to believe that the Magisterium has been after Lyra ever since the events of Northern Lights but have been unable to do anything to her following her return to Oxford at the end of The Amber Spylgass, despite knowing exactly where she is, due to the law of scholastic sanctuary that was invoked when she was placed in Jordan College. It’s been abundantly established that the Magisterium has absolutely no qualms about breaking the law if they can get away with it (kidnapping all those kids and shipping them off to the north was also illegal), so I don’t see why they didn’t just stuff her into a van and drive off when no one was looking. As it is, the idea of this all-powerful despotic force standing on the sidelines shaking their fists for eight years due to a legal loophole defangs them quite a bit.

A perhaps even more significant square peg being jammed into the round hole of His Dark Materials’ pre-existing story is the secret commonwealth itself. Lyra’s world is obviously a pretty fantastical place with clear supernatural elements in abundance (the witches, for example), but the folkloric and fairytale entities of the secret commonwealth feel several steps beyond anything we’ve seen before, which makes the story feel like it’s happening in an alternate version of the setting than the one we’re familiar with. This was an issue in La Belle Sauvage as well, but there the encounters with the commonwealth happened during the late chapters when the book had a surreal, dream-like quality and it wasn’t clear how much of what was happening we were even meant to take literally. Pullman gets a bit of wiggle room from exploiting the fact that the boundaires of the setting were deliberately loose in the original books, but even still, some of the more overtly magical events in this story just feel at odds with what’s come before.

In terms of how the new characters integrate into the plot…well there’s really only one new character who’s important to the story—Alice and Hannah Relf don’t get a lot of page time—and his interaction with our heroine takes the most prosaic and obvious route possible.

Yes, thirty-one year old Malcolm falls in love with Lyra. In the story itself she’s twenty and not Malcolm’s student, but Malcolm’s narration rather disturbingly implies that he first fell for her four years prior, when he was her tutor and she was only sixteen. Of course, he makes sure to mention that he clamped down on that immediately and is only allowing himself to acknowledge his feelings now that she’s an adult and they’ve been forced back together by fate, but I’m really not sure “lusted after a teenage girl but not too much” is the get out of jail free card that it’s supposed to be. I see this happen a lot in books written by men, and every time it makes me give the author the side-eye something fierce.

Actually, Malcolm as a whole is kind of a problem. One of my gripes with the original trilogy was the way Will Parry swoops in and steals Lyra’s thunder despite being a much less interesting character, as though Pullman or someone else involved in the books’ creation thought Northern Lights was too girly and the sequels needed a shot of testosterone. Malcolm fulfills much the same role here, being a big hunky slab of beef who can go on masculine hijinks that could have been taken up by Lyra just as easilly and struggles manfully against the Violence Dogs that live in his mind and drive him to fight people (don’t ask). I guess a handsome, burly, globetrotting adventurer-scholar who attracts the affections of a significantly younger woman wouldn’t feel like such a blatent wish fulfillment fantasty if he wasn’t written by a man in his seventies.

Lyra herself is a more interesting case. My fear going into this book is that the Lyra’s Oxford short story and the supplmentary bits in Once Upon A Time In The North imply that she turned into a fairly boring character in her post-His Dark Materials days; that is actually the case here, although it’s sort of the point given her specific character arc (more on that below). Adult Lyra does maintain a lot of her penchant for cunning and adventuring, while shedding a lot of the wilder traits she had as a child, as would be expected. I like how the book goes out of its way to make it clear that she hasn’t been sitting around virginally pining for Will, as a lot of fanfics had her doing.

Unfortunately she still does do rather a lot of sitting around, especially in contrast to Malcolm’s more boistrous adventures, but I’ll get into that when I discuss the book’s Many Themes.

If you’re a fan of Pullman’s world-building, this book drops some tasty treats. I like how the jump from La Belle Sauvage to here lets Pullman lay out his conception of the villains more clearly: in La Belle Sauvage the bad guys are couched in very explicitly religious terms, being referred to most often simply as “the Church” and its various branches, whereas twenty years later the name Magisterium has solidifed and you get the feeling they’re in the early stages of leaving their spiritual origins behind and morphing into a kind of secular shadow government that exists alongside the regular civil authorities (one of their motivations in the story is reversing this process).

Part of that world-building involves leaving behind alt-Europe and exploring alt-Asia, a region which in His Dark Materials was represented almost exclusively by mercenaries who speak broken English and a lot of exotification. The Secret Commonwealth fares better, in that we see normal people from the Middle East and Asia who speak like regular people and aren’t faceless villains, but on the other hand the alt-universe depictions of places like Constantinople still feel heavily steeped in orientalism to me; whereas Oxford and Geneva are functionally very close to their real-life modern counterparts, everywhere east and south of Europe seems to be stuck several centuries in the past. Eunuchs, the Silk Road (which is still somehow an important economic feature and apparently still operates mostly via camel despite that not making any sense in a world with cars and zeppelins) and other elements of the Mysterious Orient get wheeled out, much as trepanning and other foreign cultural practices were waved around in the original trilogy.

It’s inescapable that there just aren’t many speaking characters from the regions Lyra and her pals are adventuring through. This is still ultimately a story about white scholars and spies journeying east to meddle with forces they don’t fully understand, and which the locals would really prefer not to be meddled with. They’re doing that either out of desperation or distinctly unsavoury motives that we aren’t supposed to sympathise with, and there are frequent suggestions throughout the story that they’re all going to regret it in the end, but it still harkens back uncomfortably to racist old pulp stories in much the same way as the original trilogy sometimes did when it addressed regions beyond Europe and the north.

The book’s treatment of anywhere not firmly western European is best exemplified by a bit where Lyra is on a Turkish ferry that crashes into a refugee boat; the success of the ensuing rescue attempt and humanitarian aid is mostly ascribed to another English woman who happens to be on the ship as well. Said woman exits the story by deciding to accompany the refugees onto land in Greece, not trusting the local authorities to do a proper job of it. Given that the book otherwise treats the British (or Brytish, rather) government as a pack of cowardly Magisterium boot-lickers who are fully expected to bungle the refugee situation once it reaches their shores, I find this whole sequence both kind of offensive and contradictory.

(Yes, in real life Turkey and Greece’s reponse to the refugee crisis wasn’t exactly stellar, but that's probably not because they lacked a posh Mary Poppins-esque English woman to boss them into treating the refugees better).

Islam appears to either not exist in Lyra’s world, or at the very least has much less reach than it does in reality, judging by the fact that the Hagia Sophia is still an Eastern Orthodox cathedral and that large parts of the middle east and Africa seem to be controlled by the Magisterium. Presumably, this is due to the Calvinist flavour of ultra-Christianity that dominates Lyra’s Europe either stamping it out or just preventing it from ever coming into existence. This feels distinctly weird given the book’s otherwise-sympathetic treatment of refugees whose real-life counterparts are mostly Muslim; it gets even more uncomfortable because Pullman manages to still work in an ISIS analogue, in the form of the mysterious “men from the mountains” who are waging a scorched-earth campaign to wipe out any trace of the Dust-related revelation that’s recently come to light.

Actually, let me back up and address that a bit more.

As I mentioned in the opening plot synopsis, a big factor in the plot this time around is a spooky desert city where mysterious spooky roses grow. If the spooky oil from these roses is distilled into a spooky tincture and dropped into one’s eyes, it grants the ability to see Dust, much as the lens of the Amber Spyglass did—but on a deeper level, one that reveals information about its nature so apparently antithetical to the Magisterium and people who share their mindset that they’ve kicked off a wave of religiously-motivated violence to suppress the roses, as a result of which anyone even tangentially connected to the production of rose oil is being targeted. Because rose oil production is apparently a cornerstone of these regions’ economies (another way that anywhere not European is oddly anachronistic—are perfume and oil really going to be so important in a post-industrial world?), this violence is driving a refugee crisis that will sound awfully familiar if you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few years.

So, here’s the thing about analogies: you’ve really got to sit back and think about how you’re going about it. If you don’t, things can get silly, and when things get silly they can be unintentionally offensive. There’s a fairly infamous X-Men plotline from the 90s where mutants start being afflicted with a plague that seems to only affect them, but then all the normies start to panic when the disease jumps to the general population, and yes, it’s an AIDs metaphor that’s exactly as clunky and heavy-handed as it sounds. I guess to people either watching their loved ones die or seeing their community targeted with fear and suspicion, these harrowing issues getting tossed into a comic book about superheroes who shoot lasers out of their eyes was a bit insulting.

In the case of The Secret Commonwealth, the on-the-ground-effects of the refugee crisis in Lyra’s world are so similar to the images and stories of the real-life crisis that inspired it, it can’t help but come across as a bit crass when you pair that stuff up with a fantasy story about magic roses. Pullman’s heart was clearly in the right place here—his sympathy is all the way with the refugees and decidedly against the Europeans either exploiting them or turning their backs on the problem—but man, this analogy needed a far defter touch.

(I should point out that the story drops heavy hints about the anti-rose fervor ultimately being a cynical ploy by western business and political interests, but I don’t think that quite washes the bad taste of the whole fake-ISIS angle out of my mouth).

Frustratingly, Pullman shows himself to be capable of that deft touch when it comes to other themes and commentary, such as when he takes some shots at aspects of modern British society from a liberal perspective. There’s a scene where someone who’s visibly “different” in a manner particular to Lyra’s world is harassed on public transport, and the specific language used seems to be a deliberate nod to the recent rise in hostility towards disabled people in Britain due to the conservatives’ harping on about benefit frauds (later there’s a brief detour to a boarding school for blind girls who aren’t being treated especially kindly, and we meet a person whose daemon is paralyzed and who has to put up with some mild social difficulty because of it, so this theme is indicated elsewhere in the book as well).

In fact, issues of othering and marginilization seem to have been heavily on Pullman’s mind for this book: the titular secret commonwealth ends up having a double meaning, being both the world of unseen spirits and a loose community of folk afflicted with a certain unusual condition (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers), which Lyra is completely unaware of until she suddenly finds herself one of them.

Like most fictional minorities, this is pretty clearly a metaphor; but unlike a lot of examples of the trope, it feels like the metaphor could concievably apply to a whole swathe of real-life groups rather than there being one obvious candidate. Going back to the disability angle, I found the sub-plot harkening close to my own experiences over the last three years to a degree that at times got uncomfortable (the emphasis on carefully navigating public spaces so as to avoid drawing unwanted attention hit particularly close to home), but that could be my personal situation colouring my interpretation of the scenes in question. Then again, maybe it’s the sign of a well-constructed mataphor that different people will see different things in it (the scenes in question could be applied to the experiences of trans people or people of colour in racist societies fairly easily, and elsewhere parallels are drawn between the network of contact Lyra is introduced to and the ad-hoc refugee community that’s forming along the migration routes into Europe).

Late in the book Malcolm encounters some of the mysterious rose-haters, and one of them delivers the following spiel which, if Pullman’s twitter feed is anything to go by, is basically him speaking directly to his readers about where he sees the world heading:

“He’s saying everything you know is going to change. Things that you are familiar with will become strange and alien, and things you have never imagined will become normal. This is beginning now in many parts of the world, not just in Pisidia …’”

I guess this is all welcome, in that Pullman is a famous author writing guarenteed bestsellers so it’s good that he’s using his platform for a noble cause. On the other hand, the stories of the refugees fleeing to Europe have been and are being told by the refugees themselves, and I can guarentee you those accounts are more vivid and detailed than what’s been cooked up here (as well as, you know, centering the actual refugees instead of having them float around in the background so white people can feel sorry for them). There’s tons of fiction written by disabled people about disability, which probably don’t make the mistakes Pullman makes, which I touch on a little later. By and large, this sort of writing—whether you want to call it #ownvoices or whatever—tends not to scale the bestseller lists. This is why I’m hesitant to praise majority authors writing the stories of minorities, even when they pull it off flawlessly, which is not the case here to begin with.

Oh also, if you read a book by an actual refugee, they’re probably not going to waste your time with dull philosophy.

We find out early on that a new intellectual craze for hyper-rationalism and a sort of moral nihilism is sweeping the university campuses of Lyra’s Europe, driven by a novel that’s very obviously a parody of Atlas Shrugged and a philosopher who reminds me of Stephen Pinker, Jordan Peterson and other superstar academics without resembling any specific one. Lyra has been caught up in this, and a big component of her falling-out with Pantalaimon is his insistence that absorbing this material has fundamentally altered her personality.

The thing is, this shift in her worldview isn’t really demontrated to the reader. We’re told via Pan’s narration that she’s lost her sense of wonder and imagination and that the adventures they went on in the original trilogy have faded in her mind to the point that she seems almost willing to believe they didn’t happen, but when we’re in Lyra’s point of view absolutely none of that is evident. This means that the early arguments between Pan and Lyra—which are pivotal to the plot kicking off—are basically nonsensical. It’s extremely sloppy writing, to the point where I wonder if this entire plot element was something added relatively late in the process and then not massaged into the pre-existing material at all.

(I guess this could have been intentional—in the sense that Pullman was trying to demonstrate the rift between Pan and Lyra by having him make assumptions about her that aren’t actually based on anything concrete—but in that case Pan’s grievances look completely irrational. If this was what Pullman was going for, it probably would have worked better in a story where we weren’t privy to both characters’ internal narration).

One of the only concrete ways that Lyra’s supposed shift in worldview manifests is her initially being extremely dismissive of the secret commonwealth, which is an admittedly pretty stark change from the child Lyra of the original trilogy, who was fully ready to believe in the fantastical and the otherworldly. If you keep the dual meanings of the secret commonwealth in mind, Pullman seems to be drawing a parallel between dogmatic and restrictive worldviews that limit people’s imaginations and the social invisibility of groups that society deems unwanted or unusual. Imagination in some way begets empathy; when we’re willing to see things outside of our experience—even things that might not be real—it opens our eyes to ways of existing that we might have either not contemplated or recoiled from (if you’re looking for Pullman’s olive branch to organized religion, that last point could concievably be it). It turns out that an agent of the Magisterium is behind the whole alt-universe objectivism thing, and we learn that the Magisterium is also responsible for the rapidly-dwindling empathy shown to the arriving refugees; as Lyra sheds the restrictive skepticism that she’s been dabbling with, she becomes more aware of the plight of the refugees and is formally welcomed into the hidden community of people who share her affliction.

This is all fascinating. It’s by far the best part of the book and the moment where the story really clicked for me. But getting there is kind of a slog; the “oh, that’s what he’s saying with this shit” realization didn’t hit until over 60% of the way through the novel, and it lies on the other side of a whole lot of dull bullshit. Any time the story turns to that intellectual craze that’s the source of so much tension between Lyra and Pan, the book lapses into utterly interminable waffling about philosophy in a way that would be a drag in an adult novel, but in a book ostensibly aimed at children is utterly baffling. Many of these scenes feel like after-the-fact additions to the book, both in that the story as a whole would be far punchier and more entertaining without them, and that if you excised the individual scenes the paragraphs before and after would neatly slot together as though they had never been there.

This feels like a result of writing polemically: unlike some of the more elegant metaphors of the original trilogy, I get the feeling Pullman cooked up these themes first and then worked out how to shove them into the framework of the story afterwards, with the result that the fusion between plot and theme is inelegant to the point of frequently not existing. And the way it results in Lyra spending a lot of her chapters just sitting around puzzling through the nature of objective reality while other characters get to actually do things is infuriating.

When Pullman returns to familiar territory from the original trilogy—religion and growing up—his integration of those themes is much more elegant and interesting. In both cases he doesn’t refute the points he made before, but does add some caveats to them. In the case of religion, while he’s as hostile as ever (if not more so) towards big organized churches, he shows a distinct sympathy for more personal folk beliefs of the kind the Gyptians employ and seems to outright endorse magical thinking and a certain degree of superstition as positive, at least on an individual level (the closest real-life religious analogue would probably be some forms of neo-paganism and other homebrewed faiths that are practised either alone or in small groups, and which don’t put a big emphasis on an afterlife or obeying deities). This isn’t actually surprising—Pullman has always maintained that he considers himself spiritual on some level, and the religious beliefs of the witches in Lyra’s world never got the criticism that a Richard Dawkins-esqe worldview would demand—but it might be unexpected to people who liked to claim the original trilogy was atheistic or promoted a purely materialistic view of the world.

When it comes to the topic of growing up (which, remember, is actually the main point of His Dark Materials), The Secret Commonwealth moves beyond the joy and excitement of adolescence and into the doldrums of early adulthood, when many people realize that their childhood is well and truly over and that they actually miss some of the wonder and excitement they left behind. Pullman’s argument seems to be that these things aren’t truly lost; like the invisible beings of the secret commonwealth, they exist all around us and can be regained, if we have the humility to seek them out. This leads to a state where the freedom and loss of innocence (which Pullman considers a good thing) of adulthood are never allowed to compleely override the positive qualities found in children, one of which is a natural empathy that people only let go of when they’re taught to do so.

Before I move off the book’s themes (truly, it is a book of many themes), I want to briefly discuss its handling of the topic of homosexuality.

Back in the day Pullman got in a bit of hot water over the two angels who show up at the end of The Subtle Knife, since they’re clearly supposed to be gay. I understand there was some pearl-clutching over this from conservative quarters; these days, the characters in question are more likely to elicit criticism from the other direction, as they fall right into the stereotype of the tearful sad-gays whose relationship ends in tragedy.

The Secret Commonwealth brings up homosexuality again, and doesn’t really fair any better. Late in the novel, Lyra meets an elderly princess while moving between safehouses offered by people who share her predicament, and the princess tells a Tale Of Woe about how as a young woman her daemon fell in love with a dancer and the princess, in an effort to placate him, moved in with the dancer and started a romantic and sexual relationship with her. This, the princess assures Lyra, was purely a utilitarian move on her part and she was just pretending to love the other woman the whole time. Predictably, the relationship ended in heartbreak and sad-gays for everyone involved.

Or maybe not. The thing is, this character demonstrably lies about something else in her past, and the “I totally felt nothing for the woman I was living with in a committed relationship, no really, honest” claim comes across more than a bit like someone in denial. Given that the princess has never married and states that she turned down a steady string of suitors in her youth, and given how often daemons are used as metaphors for sexual topics in these books (she turned down the eligible young men because “her daemon” yearned for something else, do you see, this is very clever), I think we’re meant to read this as the princess walking away from potential happiness due to internalized homophobia and the expectations of her society, and then rewriting the story to make it seem as if the relationship was doomed from the start rather than it being something she sabotaged of her own volition.

Which, I mean, is still all the way into sad-gay territory even if the circumstances are a bit more complex. This interpretation also implies a level of coyness on Pullman’s part that’s really not needed; it’s 2019 and the book is already stuffed to the gills with material guarenteed to make conservative parents angry, if you want to put a lesbian in your novel you can just do it.

One thing the scene does do (actually the only thing the scene does; the entire chapter is otherwise completely pointless) is add more evidence to the “secret commonwealth as disenfranchised minority” interpretation, although even then it just highlights something I hadn’t really noticed when I was writing about this angle earlier: that the metaphor in question is actually kind of bleak.

All of the members of the metaphorical secret commonwealth that Lyra meets are depicted as sad, lonely creatures living stunted existences, wistfully reminiscing about the lives they had before and either skulking along the edges of society trying not to draw attention to themselves or shut up in their homes all day. And sure, for large parts of even modern history this was often the fate of any of the groups the metaphor could be applied to, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fucking depressing way of looking at things. I worry that younger readers who see aspects of themselves in this will come away thinking that they, too, will end up as a sad ghost drifting despondantly through life, the best they can hope for being to avoid the notice of people who’d seek to do them harm.

Yes, the book is pretty clear on the fact that these people’s difficulty is mostly the fault of how society reacts to them rather than anyhting inherent to their condition, and that if everyone stopped being weird about it most of their troubles would go away. But that just highlights the fact that no one—not even Lyra—points out that their situation is unfair or should be changed. The people of the secret commonwealth have organized a loose network of support and found a few allies among the majority, but seem not to have taken other steps towards improving their lot in life. In fact, none of them even really seem to question the assumption that they are, in fact, freaks and abominations who deserve to be avoided and shunned by normal people; at one point Lyra meets someone who showers her with patronizing sympathy instead of fear or hostility, and is pathetically grateful for it in a way that made me want to give her a good kick (this is the specific part that would definitely not be in, say, a story written by a disabled person or a trans writer or whatever you want to view the secret commonwealth as an analogy for).

I guess it’s possible that this is precisely the reaction that Pullman was going for. Maybe we as outsiders to Lyra’s world are meant to see how people in the story are over-reacting to nothing and shake our heads ruefully at the folly of closed-minded superstition and bigotry. The problem with this is that people in the real world also act in exactly the same way—that’s why it’s such an obvious allegory—and the book’s accidental suggestion that their behaviour is inevitable or in some way understandable isn’t really welcome. This is a situation where one of those sensitivity readers (or maybe multiple sensitivity readers, given the potentially infinite array of toes Pullman is stepping on here) that some authors like to rail against would have come in handy.

So, I’ve now spent an ungodly amount of time dissecting the Many Themes of this book and picking it apart. If I put all that effort into it, that must mean it’s good, right? I liked it, didn’t I?

And my answer to that would be…eh?

Not “eh” as in “it’s okay” but “eh” as in “I guess if you look at it from this angle instead of that one, then…”

The act of reading The Secret Commonwealth was certainly more pleasent than La Belle Sauvage. Pullman seems to have been putting more effort into the prose this time: the dialogue is smoother and more natural and has less bits where people start every sentence with “well” (this was a big issue in the last book, believe it or not), the descriptions are more vivid and the writing overall is less workmanlike, as though Pullman wasn’t just trying to get through the story as fast as possible.

At the same time, while it’s never as much an issue as it was in La Belle Sauvage, the same sort of rushed, untidy writing is still very much in evidence at points, especially in the second half. Dialogue proliferates wildly in a way that desperately calls for the editing shears to cut it back, there are entire chapters that don’t serve any purpose, and in general the book feels like it could have used another draft. One example is a bit where Pantalaimon, on his own in an unfamiliar city, seeks some information from a teenage girl in a garden; in his next chapter this is immediately followed by a bit where he…gets some information from a different teenage girl, in a different garden.

There’s nothing technically incorrect about this—the scenes don’t contradict each other or create plot holes—but the repitition is jarring and it feels like the sort of thing that should have been rectified in the editing process. If I noticed something like this in one of my own stories, I’d definitely change it.

Much like The Subtle Knife, this is definitely part one of a larger whole rather than a complete package; the story just stops abruptly at what feels like an arbitrary point with nothing resolved, and Malcolm’s storyline hits a sudden pause several chapters before the final page (also much like The Subtle Knife, Pullman seems to have finished this one off without particularly knowing where the next book is going—according to a recent interview, he hasn’t started writing it yet).

Because of this and the other flaws I’ve highlighted, I wouldn’t even think of reading The Secret Commonwealth unless you’re already a mega-fan of the original series. I wouldn’t even say it’s worth slogging through La Belle Sauvage for. But at the same time, the book is complex and rich and explores a lot of interesting ideas, and thus I find myself mildly impressed by it, in a detached sort of way. It’s the sort of book that I can picture critics calling a “towering achievement” (they love using that phrase), and while I wouldn’t go that far myself, I also wouldn’t entirely disagree.

On the question of whether or not this trilogy even needs to exist, I’d still lean towards the negative. As a continuation or expansion of the His Dark Materials story it’s not offering anything particularly vital, and I still suspect that a lot of this stuff was originally concieved as an entirely seperate story, either about a new cast of characters or not even set in the same universe at all. It might have been better off staying that way. The Book of Dust isn’t the Star Wars prequel trilogy of His Dark Materials—it’s nowhere close to that bad—but at the same time, unless the third volume is something really special, I can’t see it enduring in anyone’s memory the way those original books did.