greenwoodside

Finished it tonight. Getting my thoughts down before I read anyone else's reactions.

Is it me, or is Pullman ageing increasingly into C.S. Lewis, an author whose narrative choices he has previously attacked (rather shallowly, in the case of the absence of Susan from The Last Battle)? At least, I assume that all the stuff targeting New Atheism and Lyra's move towards accepting the Secret Commonwealth is expressing the author's own inclinations. I just wonder where this theme is going to go in Book 3. It would be a bit bonkers, imo, for the final part of the trilogy to be the victory of the Uncanny and the denunciation of all rationality. I don't expect it to be – some kind of accommodation seems more likely. I also couldn't share Book 2's apparent horror at the work of the fashionable rationalist authors; even if their ideas were silly/solipsistic, they were still ideas rather than manifestos.

I also didn't fully get the breakdown of the relationship between Lyra and Pan. Perhaps that was intended, since they didn't seem to get it either. But Lyra, despite the insistence of Pan/the authorial voice, never seemed seriously under the sway of either Brandt or what's-his-face. She always cared far too much about her relationship with Pan to have accepted on any deep level that he didn't really exist. Quite a way into the novel, we also get a few asides about how she'd been a bit mean now and again, and that this had put Pan off her. However, when we actually meet Lyra for the first time since Lyra's Oxford, she's being quite nice and sensible and looking after a friend of hers, going out for a good meal, chatting with the senior servants.

That said, I loved the plot that this set up – Pan setting off on his own, Lyra in pursuit. I just wish that a) I had been more convinced by its genesis and b) the departure from Brytain had happened earlier on. Loved the Oxford manoeuvrings, but I felt it made the novel as a whole a bit uneven. A novel with a more explicit see-saw structure – half in Oxford centred on my darling Alice (who needed far more page space), Hannah, the ghastly new Master of Jordan; half in Smyrna/Constantinople with Pan, Malcolm, Lyra etc. I think you'd need to put Geneva in there too. I'd remove/adapt as many of the European sections as possible to give more space for the cities in Asia Minor to breath.

I liked this book, but at the same time I was wound up by a couple of things quite a bit. More so than by anything in La Belle Sauvage. I didn't like the way that Malcolm remembered the final episode with Bonneville père – the first time round. He remembers that he killed him and left Asta to save Lyra, as opposed to trying to rescue Alice. I find the whole – apparent? - romance plot with Lyra deeply skeevy. If we end Book 3 with Lyra and Malcolm together, Lyra having been cured of her depression through the power of true love, that's one volume that will be going on a one-way trip through my upstairs window.

I like Malcolm. I loved his big POV debut, La Belle Sauvage. I just don't want him mystically erotically bonded to Lyra, or vice versa. (I did almost laugh aloud at the bit where Lyra explains very clearly what didn't happen with Will. Pullman seemed on the verge of writing: “A/N: Nothing like that went on in that section in The Amber Spyglass, you know the one I mean, you PERVERTS! Now stop bothering me about it!”).

Speaking of La Belle Sauvage, it was a very different kind of book in feeling to TSC, even though it shared several plot beats – an extended beginning “at home”, an abduction/murder by an Oxford waterway, CLUES, followed by a long, dangerous journey with various picaresque goings-on. La Belle Sauvage was self-contained, and relatively light in terms of its baggage on the grounds that Malcolm was 11 and new to everything. Mrs Coulter appeared, and Lord Asriel, and Farder Coram, but he didn't know them; they were appearing as new to him, fresh, for the first time. And being so young, he didn't have a past to reflect on. Things happened, he paid careful attention to them, he acted when he felt he had to.

The Secret Commonwealth gives us an older Lyra, much more introspective and also retrospective. She has lost her carefree spirit, and becomes evermore conscious of that as the book goes on. She remembers her friends, the dead and the few survivors, and seems hardly able to turn a corner – until the final chapters when events push her to concentrate on the now – without some recollection coming to her, even though at one point her narrative though-stream claims that she can only remember slivers of her journeys in the North. To me she seemed both gripped by nostalgia for her lost youth, and suffering from something like PTSD. She won't even think properly about her father (that line more or less actually crops up in her thoughts at one point), though for a surname she immediately chooses a reference to his name, showing that he's not far from the surface of her mind. Is she someone trying to recover from a difficult past by denying it? Is this what has been disturbing Pan?

The overall effect was a little deadening. Lyra's POV chapters make quite a difficult read. Not boring, exactly, but slow and less visceral than most of La Belle Sauvage. She was still clearly the most developed and well-rounded character in the novel. Meeting Malcolm again was nice, but we've been out of his life for two decades. He's now a scholarly super spy (an absolutely fair development of his character from what we saw in La Belle Sauvage). Still, he seems if anything to have lost depth in the intervening years. It would be nice if he had acquired something – some phobia, some bitterness, some oddness, some imperfection – on the way. Apart from his “love” for Lyra, whom he hasn't really spent much time with as an adult, and which may not register with Pullman as an imperfection, I can't see any trace of one. I thought for awhile that Malcolm's daemon might have settled as a cat partly because his childhood experiences left him with a horror of water, but no.

Onto the antagonists. Delamere was a flat evil uncle character. This in fact seemed to be nodded to in the recap of the plot of Jahan and Rukhsana. He serves to get events moving, and his takeover of the Magisterium was unnervingly plausible; at the moment, he doesn't seem likely to be of interest for more than his ability to move the plot forward and put pressure on our heroes.

I am intrigued by Olivier. He is, in the accurate words of Malcolm, “a slippery, vicious little brat”. At the same time, he seems to have a limited kind of self-awareness. He's a brat rather than a man. Currently he seems likely to mature into someone every bit as nasty as his father (horrible man, very effective - i.e. terrifying - primary villain!). Still, there is the faint glimmer of hope for him in that he doesn't seem to be a complete psychopath, if not by much – he chooses to shoot Lyra from a distance, not trusting himself to do it close to.

I think it would be nice if he was allowed to improve a bit in the next book, but he probably won't. Pullman isn't especially fond of redemption arcs – the closest he came was with Mrs Coulter, and (not having read The Amber Spyglass since I was 14/15, it's a bit hazy) I don't think I was convinced by that. In Pullman, most good people stay good, and bad people stay bad. The personality is symbolically fixed when the daemon keeps to one shape. Though the multiple references to people who'd parted ways with their daemons after personality clashes could suggest that change and continuity is something the author will explore further in Book 3?

Actually, the most effective antagonists were minor ones. The soldier-policemen who may work for the CCD, who dragged away Alice, and wrecked Hannah's home. The cowardly bursar, who wouldn't stand up for his colleagues, claiming mendaciously that he was allowing their unjust suffering in order to “protect the staff”! Characters full of a terribly mundane sort of evil. Brutes that don't seem to have sufficient moral imagination to desire or form another way of proceeding. Well-paid middle-aged suits who prefer to ignore the mistreatment of the people close to them, rather than do anything at all to help.

There were a lot of minor characters who were nicely sketched and good to meet too. From the afterword, it looks as if we'll be seeing a couple of them again; sadly, Pullman didn't mention Princess Cantacuzino among them – at least there's a good chance we'll meet with her passionate daemon Phanourios at some point.

My verdict on this book will only really be decided once I have the third one in my hands. Based on the set-up, I think it could be spectacular – if Pullman can pull the threads together in an elegant way. And there are a lot of threads to manage.

Additional thoughts after the reread (in Welsh, as practice):

• Gwnes i fwynhau teithiau Lyra, Pan a Malcolm ar draws Ewrop, ond roedd agweddau yn dod yn ailadroddol -- er enghraifft, pan fyddai Lyra yn gofyn am al-Khan al-Azraq (the Blue Hotel), roedd y broses yn cymryd  gormod o amser. Nid oes angen i fi glywed sawl tro: 'Ydych chi'n gwybod ble mae'r Gwesty Glas?' 'Nac ydw. Ond mae'n lle drwg iawn iawn iawn -- peidiwch â mynd!' (*cleciau taran*)


• Darllenais i ddoe am gefndir Pullman. Roedd ei dad yn beilot RAF yn ystod gwrthryfel y Mau Mau yn y pumdegau. Cafodd ei ladd ar ôl i awyren ddryllio a dyfarnwyd Distinguised Flying Cross wedi ei farw. Fel oedolyn, ac efallai hefyd fel oedolyn yn ei oed a'i amser, darganfuodd Pullman fod ei rieni ar fin ysgaru; cafodd ei dad problemau gamblo. Gallai hyn roi ongl mwy diddorddol i gymeriad Olivier Bonneville, mab ofnadwy i dad gwaeth. Mae hefyd yn dechrau egluro hoffter Pullman ar gyfer 'action men' fel Lord Asriel, John Parry a Lee Scoresby. Mae Pullman wedi dweud ei fod yn bwriadau ysgrifennu cofiant, a dw i'n edrych ymlaen at ei ddarllen.


• Ydy pob cymeriad pwysig yn Pullman yn brydferth/rhywiog/enghraifft drawiadol y dynol ryw? Mae'n dechrau mynd yn annifyr. Roedd yr adroddwr yn dweud am Alice (Alice! Fy ffefryn): 'doedd hi ddim yn bert, ond gallai fod yn boeth; aî dynion yn wallgof amdani'. Wel, iawn.


• Rwyf yn teimlo diddordeb cryf mewn dioddef seicolegol Lyra a Pantaleimon. Beth bynnag, tybed a fuodd Pullman erioed yn ysgrifennu am gymeriad dynol gwryw a ddioddefai yn yr un ffordd-- ac  yn ysgrifennu gyda chydymdeimlad?


• Ar ôl gwylio 'Conclave' a hefyd darllen ychydig o hanes y Dadeni, dw i ddim yn meddwl o hyd bod llwyddiant Delamere ar gipio'r Magisterium yn gredadwy iawn. Byddai wedi bod llawer yn fwy cymhleth. Petai ond Pullman yn darparu mwy o rwystrau yn ei erbyn, byddai Delamere wedi edrych yn fwy deinamig ac effeithiol fel 'big bad'.