Synopsis:
It is twenty years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey. It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford's Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child . . . The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed. Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm; once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from the flood, now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right. Theirs is a world at once familiar and extraordinary, and they must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost - a city haunted by daemons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.
Review:
The Secret Commonwealth continues Lyra's story, many years after the conclusion of His Dark Materials, with a young woman adrift from her deamon and starting to understand who she really is in the world. It's a story about acceptance, challenging the rules left by the old, and self discovery. As always, Pullman's writing is a joy to read. He can draw me back into this world effortlessly, as if I've never been away from Lyra and Pantalaimon. But she's not the girl I'm used to seeing. At the start of the story she's adrift, unsettled by recent texts she's read regarding philosophy and the purpose of deamons. She's lost her spark, her imagination and recklessness. Everything that's the essence of Lyra, the essence of Pan, is gone. I struggled at first to relate to this woman, although her daily thoughts of Will and how he would have handled certain situations absolutely broke my heart. But she's essentially a stranger clinging onto memories, one who doesn't understand Pan anymore, and one who doesn't welcome the strange and unusual into her life. She's changed. And not for the better. With the reintroduction of Mal and Alice, we see Lyra's fate has been continuously intertwined with the two without her ever knowing her entire life. But the naivety of childhood has worn off, and she's soon plunged into their dangerous world once again. A world full of secret societies, secret people...and a secret commonwealth. There's a lot also going on in the background here. The political machinations we see peeks of in His Dark Materials involving the Magisterium move to the forefront as new players Marcel Delamare and alethiometer reader Olivier Bonneville seek to gain powerful footings within the church. Delamare in particular has grand plans to unite the Magisterium together for his own gains - gains involving Lyra and revenge. Developments that happened over 10 years ago slowly start to come to fruition, in what I can only describe as the longest waiting game ever seen. It's a plot steeped heavily in espionage, lies and politics. Olivier Bonneville is also an interesting new player to the game. Son of the man with the hyena deamon seen in La Belle Sauvage, he's an expert with the alethiometer, and haunted by ideas of revenge towards the man who killed his father. He's not as clever as he thinks he is, and he understands very little about the world he's so heavily involved in, and his obsession with Lyra will not end well. I liked Lyra's various interactions throughout the novel, as we see her travel across Europe and into the wider world outside Oxford on her quest. Some of the things she encounters along the way are uncanny and strange, but they help to bring Lyra back into what she knows best from her past - her acceptance of everything that's different. I also enjoy her interactions with Mal, Alice and the gyptians, and would have loved Lyra to have spent more time amongst Ma Costa. The comparisons between the girl who visited the Fens as a child with Ma Costa and the woman who revisits now only further highlight her differences, and what she's lost. The story rushes to it's finale through bloodshed and mystery, towards the Blue Hotel. It's here that Lyra has been pulled, through her own deciding or by destiny, to find what she's been missing. But there's no conclusion, and a whole heap of questions left unanswered in the desert. It's reminiscent of The Subtle Knife in it's lack of conclusion - more a bridging and setting up kind of novel towards the final instalment, but I can't deny it didn't leave a bitter aftertaste because of this lack of finality to anything. It was so wonderful to be back with Lyra and Pan in this world, but you must go into this with an open mind. It's a different novel, with a different (much older) protagonist. It's darker, with darker themes and much more intellectual talk and ideas. It's not going to be for everyone, and people expecting more of His Dark Materials will be sorely disappointed. It's not world spanning adventure, but world changing schemes and thoughts. Go in with an open mind and open heart.
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