Book review: The Secret Commonwealth

A successor to Northern Lights and friends. Lyra is now twenty, a student at St Sophia's, but all is not well between her and Pan: they are estranged: not only can they separate (I forget the heart-rending circumstances from the end of The Amber Spyglass) but they really aren't getting on.

Here the weakness of PP's theology / philosophy starts to get in the way of the plot-driving. If you just skip over that, it is fine; you're left with a decent adventure-mystery story with far-middle-eastern tinges. But if you pay attention, there are problems. Lyra has been led astray by two books of popular philosophy, one arguing that rationality is all; one that daemons don't exist. Or some mixture of the two; it is all piffle so I wasn't really paying attention. But obvs, emotions are a real thing, real states of our brain, evolved over the aeons for presumably evolutionarily valuable purposes that one can readily conjecture. And obvs the daemons exist - in PP's world - because they persist over time, can interact with the environment, can be reliably described in concordant ways by independent witnesses, and so on. The nominally intelligent Lyra and her friends fail to think of any of this, and PP doesn't really put much effort into them. But on reflection this is a problem, because I think PP actually cares about this aspect and is trying to say something, and failing.

Along with the Dust, which already made no sense, we now have Rose Oil, which really makes even less, but we don't find out much about it in this book, presumably that comes into volume three heaven help us. We only find out that mysterious "mountain men" who read like Muslim fanatics want to destroy it, and those who grow it. Aside: an early harbinger of this is Miriam's father's perfumery going broke; but this is quite implausible: just one source of perfume would not be so vital. Going further, within the book, it begins to seem as though the entire economy of the Middle East hangs on Rose Oil, despite no-one knowing anything about it.

PP is regrettably heading off to woke-land; you can ignore that too if you like but it mars the story if you're paying attention: for example all corporations are unerringly and unthinkingly evil, because obvs, how could it be otherwise.

Finally, I think he allows himself carelessness in speech; for example at one point a character says "People are feeling brutalised by the laws, exploited by their bosses, discriminated against by social structures they've got no means of changing". This is more the plot background; people don't speak like that.

And finally again: I think he is careless of the consistency of his world. In Oxford, it is all steam trains and bicycles and we're maybe somewhere vaguely like the 1920's; meanwhile the insurgents in the desert have pickup trucks and machine guns and are in the now.