Cover illustration: Chris Wormell
We may need food to stay alive, but we need stories to stay whole.
Not sticking with it
Yes. It has taken me over two years to get around to writing up my thoughts on this second part of The Book of Dust. I have to admit that for a long time I found it difficult to get into. With countless others, I am a huge admirer of His Dark Materials and I regard La Belle Sauvage in some ways even more highly (See my review from October 2017 ). So I eagerly bought a copy of The Secret Commonwealth as soon as it came out. But after several attempts to start it, I left off part way through and read other things instead.
Thankfully, I am experienced enough to know that this sometimes happens, even with good books, and that the issue can be with the reader not the story. Books have the ability to find you at the right time (or maybe vice versa) and sometimes the time just isn’t right. Then, unexpectedly, for me the right time came for this book just after Christmas; I read it right through with intense involvement and enormous enjoyment. Even then, I spent a good while reflecting on it before I felt ready to write my responses.
I think my initial problem was that, after all my emotional and intellectual investment in Lyra’s previous story, her conflict with her own dæmon was so disturbing that it was easier just to leave off dealing with it. Despite all her previous experiences, Lyra’s total abandonment of anything magical or mystical in favour of hard, narrow rationality was just too depressing to live with. I knew that this was a big part of what Philip Pullman was seeking to explore, an aspect of her developing adulthood, but for some inexplicable reason, at that time I wasn’t ready to face it. The story felt meandering and, compared to the earlier books, somehow flat, even despite the early drama (melodrama?) of the murder on the riverside path.
Sticking with it
This time I was still disturbed by the breakdown of Lyra’s relationship with Pantalaimon, still surprised by a plot that seemed sometimes to belong more to Sally Lockhart than to Lyra Silvertongue. However, the sheer quality of writing soon pulled me into the intrigue. This time I wanted to discover exactly where this story (and its characters) were heading. In persisting, I came to recognise this as another very fine development of Philip Pullman’s epic, no longer as an intellectual expectation but as a deeply engrossing reading experience.
Full appreciation of The Secret Commonwealth does really need familiarity with His Dark Materials, now its back story. However, despite the original trilogy coming between the first and this second part of The Book of Dust, this volume does feel more like a direct sequel to La Belle Sauvage, than might initially be imagined. Although His Dark Materials does involve a good deal of travel, it feels primarily an ‘adventure’, albeit often a rather dark one. Both parts thus far of The Book of Dust are essentially a journey, a kind of Homeric Odyssey, with multiple distinct and disparate encounters strung together along its way. The first part is the rather more straightforward journey, with its principal protagonist swept down the flooded river towards Lyra’s future, aboard Malcolm’s canoe. This second part, reflecting its far more adult characters and concerns, is a more fragmented journey. Its three protagonists, with this time Pan playing a major role separately from Lyra and Malcolm, are each travelling independently towards more uncertain destinations. True, the source of the ‘attar of roses’ is held out as a possible ultimate goal, but it is not (yet?) principally in the minds of any of them. Pan is purportedly seeking Lyra’s imagination, without knowing exactly how or where he will find it, whilst Lyra is seeking Pan and Malcolm is seeking Lyra, in both cases similarly thrashing around with uncertainties about whether destinations are going to be the right ones.
A fractured narrative
The theme of Pan’s departure and quest, the separation of Lyra from her imagination, and the associated opposition of rationality with intuition (fantasy, magic, ‘the secret commonwealth’) is strongly compelling. However other thematic undercurrents have become more diverse and complex too. Alongside (anti-)religion, this books explores politics, with added commentary on current affairs. The Magisterium seems now to represent not only religion and extreme prejudice but also totalitarian domination of the most insidious kind. Much of this chimes with our own world, as most certainly do the issues around migrants and the disastrous sea-crossings of fleeing refugees.
There are other ways in which the telling of this story of a fractured, diverse journey reminds me of an Odyssey, this time in the specific form of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Narration not only switches between the different characters and locations, but it also segues (and even sometimes jolts) between reality and fantasy, between ‘straight’ narration and lyricism, between something near objectivity and different subjective viewpoints. Metaphor and allegory fade in and out. True Philip Pullman flags his switches far more clearly than does James Joyce, so he does not leave his readers quite so befudled. Even so, this kaleidoscope of viewpoints can be disconcerting. (The episode of Lyra’s encounter with the alchemist seems particularly so.) However once you have committed to go with the flow of the book, this writerly complexity it is both exciting and engaging. The view may be fragmented but the picture that emerges is revelatory.
Understanding not understanding
Like La Belle Sauvage, but even more so, this is a readers book (for readers of whatever age) not a children’s adventure. Of course, much more so than my own parallels with the Oddesy, Philip Pullman’s own acknowledged reference is of another great epic. That he sees a relationship to Edmund Spenser’s The Færie Queene is pointed up by the terminal quotes of the text. As Spenser himself said of his own work, it is ‘Cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices.’ But it is not necessary to ‘get’ every allusion in The Secret Commonwealth intellectually. It may not even be a good thing. Philip Pullman has often said that he does not see his fiction as having an absolute’meanng’, or at least that what he intended is not what he intends. Whatever it means to each reader is what it means. This book, like the first of this trilogy, requires personal response rather than intellectual understanding. My advice to any reader would be to go with the flow.
‘Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.’
It may take years to unfathom, re-readings, reflective revisits, but it is a wonderful, wondrous journey. Enjoy.
Notwithstanding, The Secret Commonwealth, and the developing trilogy, is ultimately narrative, a story.This is the middle book and it has understandably not got to wherever its journey is going. It most certainly leaves us on tenterhooks. The author has also often said that his stories are not meticulously pre-planned. His ability to allow a tale to invent and unfold itself is part of his genius, in no small part what makes his stories so special. They don’t hurtle towards some inevitable, totally predictable end.
However, I hope Philip Pullman discovers soon where this story is taking us all. We are desperate to know.
Meanwhile there is The Imagination Chamber to look forward to. When this author promises to take us further and deeper into the world he has already shared we must allow ourselves to be drawn there, knowing there will room for our imagining too.
My only regret about Chris Wormell’s stunning artwork for The Secret Commonwealth is that there isn’t a great deal more if it. I am, however, much enjoying the sumptuous illustrated editions of His Dark Materials currently being brought out.