The Secret Commonwealth- a review

The Secret Commonwealth

 

'Young people don't believe in the Secret Commonwealth, Brabandt said. It's all chemistry and measuring things as far as they're concerned.They got an explanation for everything. and they're all wrong'

Introduction

The Secret Commonwealth is the fifth book set in Philip Pullman’s multiverse and the second in a trilogy entitled ‘The Book of Dust’. The first of these, ‘La Belle Sauvage’ dealt with events prior to the original trilogy.Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of the ‘His Dark Materials books is an infant and the action happens around her.  By contrast, The Secret Commonwealth is a sequel to ‘His Dark Materials’ that presents us with Lyra as a young woman who is now an Oxford undergraduate.  

In many ways too it is a direct sequel to ‘La Belle Sauvage’. It deals with characters first encountered in that book and the motivation of the characters opposed to Lyra and her friends stems from the events chronicled in it just as much as those in ‘The Amber Spyglass’.

An adult Lyra is going to inhabit a very different book to its predecessors, a fact which is key to understanding it. Whilst the child Lyra was an elemental spirit driven by the black and white certainties of childhood, the Lyra of this book is more nuanced, complex even. She is also very uncertain of herself as the story commences. We quickly find that the student Lyra has been influenced by her study reading, in particular by a novel and a text book, away from imagination and towards rationality and logic. By contrast Pantalaimon, her daemon (the visible manifestation of her soul that people in her world share their lives with), retains the outlook they shared in her youth. The two of them have become estranged, so much so that Pan leaves her; but not before he has embroiled her in a murder case.

A genre discussion

Which brings us to the question of genre. This book straddles, indeed defies genres. There are elements of the film noirs typified by Humphrey Bogart, or the thrillers of writers like Alastair Maclean, or books like Graham Greene’s the Third Man (it has many of the spy genre staples such as coded messages between spies and a secret department in Whitehall), whilst the cover speaks to us of the graphic art from between the wars. It is also a coming of age novel with links to the fantasy genre and a vehicle for philosophical discussion. At the same time it delights in offering homage to a completely different reference point; the Indiana Jones films. I offer in evidence a History Professor who can handle himself in a fight and travels the world getting embroiled in quixotic adventures, local fixers who provide assistance to our hero and shadowy villains up to no good, with a good dose of action and excitement.  

Yet overlaying all this (or do I mean underlying?) are some very deliberate contemporary references. As Lyra travels across Europe to the Middle East she encounters boatloads of refugees on the Mediterranean, whilst the growing authoritarian grip of the Magisterium in Europe echoes current concerns of the resurgence of the right and the dangers of a return to Fascism. The book also explores attitudes to minorities and the way scarce resources (in this case a mysterious rose oil) can cause conflict, being waged by what seem like first cousins to Muslim extremists in our world but influenced behind the scenes by multi-national companies.

Wider Themes

As if all this wasn’t complex enough Pullman adds two more layers of theming. The first concerns the element in the original stories that they are most famous for; the visible daemons. From Northern Lights onwards every human we meet is accompanied by a Daemon, a visible incarnation of their soul. Usually of the opposite gender, your daemon is an aspect of you, but one you can touch and talk to, your conscience or your inner voice. In Northern Lights Lyra and Pantalaimon are nearly forcibly severed from each other; in The Amber Spyglass they voluntarily separate to allow Lyra to fulfil her quest, but they remain a partnership, a symbiotic pairing.

In this Book the author takes all the readers certainties and strips them away. First it is revealed that Lyra and her daemon have become more like separate entities, and soon they are parted. Then Lyra, who sets out to find Pan, discovers that there are other people in the world who are living without their daemons, whilst later still she discovers a black market trade in daemons where desperate poor people sell their daemons to dealers who sell them on to those who have lost theirs.

This all very unsettling for the reader, as it is for Lyra, who is already grappling with the proposition from one of her favourite writers that daemons are no more than figments of people’s imaginations, a self-created psychological prop. There are echoes here, although I doubt it is consciously intended by Mr Pullman, of the way J.K. Rowling makes her readers re-evaluate Professor Dumbledore in books six and seven. She is able reveal a more complex Dumbledore at this point because Harry, her hero, has become old enough to realise that things don’t have the simple explanations you accept as a child. In this book the adult Lyra is undergoing a similar process.

The second over-arching theme is the battle, not between good and evil, but between scientific rationality and the world of the imagination. Pitted against the logic and reductionism of the modern authors who have seduced Lyra is the Secret Commonwealth of the book’s title, the hidden world of sprites, ghosts, spectres and nature spirits. The book sees Lyra gradually move from one side to the other, in the process re-discovering the imagination Pan accuses her of losing. It is fairly clear which side Philip Pullman is on; I am reminded of the views of J.R.R. Tolkien. In more than one essay he talked about the human need for imagination as well as science, stating a preference for trees over lamp-posts and preferring to see the Moon as a mysterious influencer of men’s lives rather than as a lump of rock. In the Lord of the Rings the characters who prefer science are the bad guys; Saruman who is described as having a mind of cogs and wheels and Sauron who undertakes genetic experiments to produce the orcs.

As a child Lyra was able to read her Alethiometer, a device for revealing truth and information, instinctively. As a grown-up she can no longer do this. Instead she has to learn to open her mind to hints from the Secret Commonwealth, to trust to instinct. In this way she can be guided on her quest to find Pan. In an intriguing twist, she is being stalked through an Alethiometer by one of the bad guys who has learned to read it instinctively. They can sense each other through their instruments. If that sounds familiar, it is- Kylo Ren and Ray in the recent Star Wars offerings can sense each other through the force. Again, I doubt this influenced Mr Pullman’s writing, but it is an intriguing congruence of an idea that clearly appeals to us.

The elephant in the room

When discussing genre I missed one out- Romance. This book could also be filed under Romance, but this brings us to its most problematic issue. The Indiana Jones style character, Malcolm Polstead, was one of the two young people who rescued Lyra as a baby. When she was a moody teenager (no doubt going through a Goth phase) he was an (unsuccessful) personal tutor to her. Now they meet again and she begins to realise how involved he has been in her life. For his part, Malcolm admits to himself something that is blindingly obvious to colleagues and friends, he is in love with her. As it stands at this point, with her twenty and him having reached his thirties, it is not an outrageous proposition. But it is made clear that he has had these feelings a long time, since she was in her mid-teens, which throws it into a different light.

In the light of #metoo, this is a red flag for many readers that throws their enjoyment of the book into question. We are clearly told early on that a previous relationship with a good-looking gypsy boy had a physical element (her virginity is long gone, is the message), which establishes she is ready for a relationship. Mr Pullmans problem here is that he is a middle-aged male writing about a man having feelings for an under-age girl. We all know such things happen and it’s not as if Malcolm acted on it at the time, but it still leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. My problem here is that I share Mr Pullman’s age and gender; if they disqualify him from writing about it then I probably should be wary of commenting on it. But speaking as a man with daughters it definitely spoiled the book for me, together with a scene at the end of the story which describes a sexual assault and its aftermath. I, and other reviewers, are not suggesting such things should never be written about. But this book is the fifth in a series that started out life in the children’s section, which makes it much more likely that it will be read by children. The ones who started out with Northern Lights twenty-five years ago are now in their thirties. But the precocious reader who has devoured ‘His Dark Materials after seeing it on Television could well be under ten years old.

It is this which makes this book so problematic for me. It is a shame, because the world it inhabits is so rich and interesting, and the ideas explored so pertinent to the human condition, that it makes for compelling reading. As I read the closing scene I still wanted to know what will happen in the final instalment. But I know I would not have wanted the child sat in a chair in my house reading Northern lights back in the 1990’s to have picked up this book afterwards. It is a rare example of Mr Pullman striking a discordant note. But I guess you should read the book and decide for yourself.