"If rationality can't see things like the secret commonwealth, it's because rationality's vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can't see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it's the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure …" [loc. 6612]
If La Belle Sauvage had the feeling of a Boys Own adventure, The Secret Commonwealth is, in part, a thriller in the classic Le Carre tradition. Which is not to say that there's no room for philosophy, for emotion, for the eponymous Commonwealth -- though that is not as immediate as one might expect.
The novel opens not with Lyra, now an undergraduate, but with her dæmon Pantalaimon having an adventure of his own, on his own. There is a queasy tension between the two, which Pan blames on Lyra's reading matter: a novel called The Hyperchorasmians, set in a world where nobody has dæmons, and a philosophical tract, The Constant Deceiver, which claims that dæmons don't really exist. Lyra is in the grip of a steely rationality, and Pan mourns her imagination.
But he also witnesses a very corporeal murder, which is first indication of a new regime in the Magisterium. Attempting to unravel the conflicting tales -- many of which mention a city in the desert, where roses grow -- leads Lyra, Pantalaimon and Malcolm Polstead far from home.
SPOILERS below in white.
I found Pan's abandonment of Lyra powerfully affecting, and ached with pity for them both. (I don't care if the author dislikes the word 'depression': it is how I would describe Lyra's mental state. And Pan's courage is painful.) I spent much of the book feeling queasy at the bitterness and sorrow of their separation, waiting and hoping for their reunion: now I am worried that Pullman -- who does not, haha, pull his fictional punches -- will do something terrible in the final book to Lyra, or Pan, or both of them.
Malcolm's growing romantic attraction to Lyra made me queasy in quite a different way. He used to be her teacher! He changed her nappy! And he's been finding her sexually attractive since she was in her early teens. I very much like Malcolm, who is thoroughly competent and ruthless in this volume: but I don't like the relationship that seems to be developing between the two.
And speaking of things I don't like: was it really necessary to include a graphic depiction of a sexual assault? (Perhaps it was: many readers assumed that, in the final chapters of The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will went further than just kissing, but Lyra assures us it isn't so.) Still, this was a vividly unpleasant scene -- powerful, well-written, immediate, but did it add to the plot?
While I'm being critical, I would have liked at least one of the homosexual characters to be positively depicted. Olivier's constantly described as needing the admiration of older men; Mercurius is an opportunist coxcomb.
SPOILERS end.
The Secret Commonwealth shows us a wider world which parallels, but differs from, our own. There are second-hand water cannons, shipwrecked refugees, a post-truth movement: there is also a Church without a Pope (blame Calvin), a different history of colonialism (New Denmark?) and, of course, dæmons. Dæmons -- 'part of a human being' -- acted and being acted upon like, well, human beings: unfaithful, enslaved, commodified; paralysed, masquerading, treacherous.
Or perhaps imaginary, as Simon Talbot's The Constant Deceiver would have it. But that way lies a rationalist desert, a mechanical universe without meaning or beauty: and that reductive view, immediately after (though not before) reading this novel, seems a tragedy.
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