Philip Pullman, Christopher Wormell: Secret Commonwealth (2019, Penguin Books, Limited)
784 pages
English language
Published April 4, 2019 by Penguin Books, Limited.
Beautifully and compelling written adventure with so many highs and lows, daring escapes and ripping yarns. The magisterium sub-plot is a bit dull and there's a bit of hand waving to make the plot keep moving, but still very excellent.
WARNING: THIS IS HALF A BOOK
I was quite furious when I got to the end and realised there is literally no resolution to any story threads, it just stops at a completely arbitrary chapter. Infuriating, you've been warned.
Now that we're past that part and onto the actual content of the book - it's mostly great. Love that Pullman followed up Northern Lights with a direct rebuttal to anyone who took the series to mean rationalism is the be-all-end-all.
Will impatiently wait for the second half of the book.
Still such an immersive world to step into, twenty years later, and I still love Lyra and Pan fiercely, though with the former it's hard to say why, as adult Lyra lacks so many of the qualities that made her loveable.
The glaring holes in the plot and the huge exposition dumps annoyed me, as did some of the more problematic aspects (the bad scary east with its terrorist 'men from the mountains') but it was satisfying reading the evils of the corporate neoliberal university invading the dreaming spires of Jordan College, as that's been the reality of universities since Northern Lights was published.
The theme of the human-daemon connection/separation remains as affecting as ever, and I've been stroking my wee dog Rowan more often that usual while reading. I don't know if there's been many psychoanalytic readings of His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust, but the retro quality of …
Still such an immersive world to step into, twenty years later, and I still love Lyra and Pan fiercely, though with the former it's hard to say why, as adult Lyra lacks so many of the qualities that made her loveable.
The glaring holes in the plot and the huge exposition dumps annoyed me, as did some of the more problematic aspects (the bad scary east with its terrorist 'men from the mountains') but it was satisfying reading the evils of the corporate neoliberal university invading the dreaming spires of Jordan College, as that's been the reality of universities since Northern Lights was published.
The theme of the human-daemon connection/separation remains as affecting as ever, and I've been stroking my wee dog Rowan more often that usual while reading. I don't know if there's been many psychoanalytic readings of His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust, but the retro quality of these books also goes quite well with the philosophical aspects, with the questions it's asking more resonant with the academic theory of the 90s and early 2000s rather than today.
It's fitting that it reminded me of my undergraduate years in lots of ways, and probably why the overwhelming pathos is of melancholy and dis-ease. The creeping sense of dread is augmented by today's political/social/ecological context as much as anything else - I read the chapter featuring a character's arrest by dubious authorities just after seeing the news of the guidelines for what external speakers now can't say in English schools. I had started this book because of I wanted escapism, but it felt more like dystopia than fantasy, and as a dear friend has written, 'your dystopian fiction won't save you now'.
