The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Here’s the thing: I admire what Pullman can do; I admire the way he can articulate things; I admire the worlds he has creates with all of their wild wonder and glory; but I do not admire this book. It is overlong, overwrought and often – frankly – dull.

I wanted to like it a lot. I’d waited for it for a long time, due to a reservation queue of thousands, and I was excited to get my hands on it. But that excitement faded, it faded so swiftly, for this is not the best of his work. Pullman is a good writer but this is something like fifteen books packed into one, and all of them begging for an edit in a way that I have not witnessed for a long time. There is a story here. There is always a story with Pullman, often a powerful and wonderful one, but here it’s drowned in noise. Theory. Metaphor. Commentary. Politics. And all of this is fine, providing it’s managed. Providing at some point it stops – simply, briefly – to let the book breathe.

But it doesn’t. We have characters stopping to info-dump with each other for three hundred pages before wandering off and never being heard of ever again. Important Things Being Discussed In Impenetrable Manners Between Important People With Increasingly Incomprehensible Symbolic Fashion. Tired tropes of sexual violence being used to little to no effect. Messy subplots. Fifteen page arguments about theory. And then there’s the characters who swim in and out every ten chapters so that you can never quite grasp who and what they are or even, really care.

This feels like a book that has been told that it’s important and begun to believe it.

And oh, I did not care about it. I cared at first because I loved the story of Lyra (oh that past tense, that past tense). I have sat on her and Will’s bench in Oxford, I have trod in her steps, but now I do not care. I just don’t, and that saddens me so much. She is one of the biggest, wildest characters to take part in the literary world and yet here, she’s neutered. Every single step, every single breath. And I know (hope) that this is the stutter before the step of her journey, the moment where the world beats her down before she rises, but I do not care any more. I am done with these, I think, and so there we are. I am tired of this series and I am done.



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