Philip Pullman continues to produce wonderful fantasias of the imagination
There are at least as many tour guides in Oxford as there are colleges. Virtually every kind of introduction to the city is offered via the medium of enormous signs and enthusiastic hustlers whose patter would do credit to a Middle Eastern souk. If you want to tread in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll and JRR Tolkien, there’s a guided trip for you, and if you have children of a certain age then you, too, can wander around the halls, gardens and libraries that were used in the filming of the Harry Potter series. Yet nobody offers a less nostalgic tour, which has as much to say about present-day Oxford, and the rest of England, as it does about any fanciful and sanitised version of it. This would be a trip into the world of His Dark Materials, the series of novels by Philip Pullman that have transformed from a trilogy into, currently, a quintet with the publication of The Secret Commonwealth, one of the most anticipated novels of the year.
Pullman is currently Oxford’s most famous living author, the bearer of a torch that has passed from Carroll, Tolkien and CS Lewis to him. Like his forbears, he creates richly detailed and imaginary worlds that bear as strong a relation to their own experiences as it does to the imagination. He is a mild-mannered, donnish presence in person, reserving his vitriol for social media, where he rails against Brexit, Boris Johnson (who he recently suggested should be strung up from a lamppost à la Mussolini, leading to a rare onslaught of outrage against him) and all that he sees as false and corrupt in today’s society. Much of this anger has been channelled into his books, which set its central protagonist Lyra Belacqua and her allies against a totalitarian institution known as The Magisterium, a fictionalised version of the Catholic Church.
Aficionados of the series, which has sold in the tens of millions, probably think they know what is in the latest instalment. They may be wrong. Pullman took a significant break between the publication of The Amber Spyglass in 2000 and the return to Lyra’s world in La Belle Sauvage, a prequel to the series, in 2017, but The Secret Commonwealth is the first true sequel to the eschatological events depicted in the original trilogy. At first glance, Pullman might seem to face the same dilemma that JJ Abrams encountered when he came to reboot the Star Wars series; if one has arrived at a perfectly satisfying (if unavoidably bittersweet) conclusion, with evil vanquished or at least at bay and the heroes triumphant, what is the point in continuing the story? Thankfully, he has an answer that is both satisfying and, in our confused world, stirring in its eliciting of hope.
Lyra is 20 years old in The Secret Commonwealth, and far removed from the sprite-like heroine of the original trilogy. She is estranged from her daemon Pantalaimon, who still harbours resentment towards her for her actions in The Amber Spyglass, and is in thrall to the modish moral philosopher Simon Talbot, whose central argument is that objective reality does not exist. Experience has hardened her, removing the joie de vivre that was so integral to her character in the original trilogy. Many of the characters from the earlier books return, but they are older, shabbier and more frightened. And the Magisterium has recovered from the defeat of the Metatron to once again dominate society. Its major opposition is Oakley Street, an underfunded secret service of sorts so poor that its directors have to travel between clandestine meetings on third-class rail tickets.
It is not too seismic a spoiler to reveal that Lyra, Pantalaimon and Malcolm Polstead, the now grown-up protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, face a foe more implacable and dangerous than ever before. Of course the Magisterium is every bit as malevolent, but then so is Talbot’s bland emptiness, as his charm and witticisms fail to conceal an entirely hollow and mendacious fraud. Comparisons could be made with Pullman’s fellow Oxford author Richard Dawkins, but a more relevant – if perhaps unintended – one is surely our current Prime Minister, another master of concealing his vacuousness with fine words. Pullman cites John Milton – whose Paradise Lost gave His Dark Materials its title – as a great influence, and it is hard not to think of the oleaginous demon Belial in the second book of his epic poem when encountering Talbot:
A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seem’d
For dignity compos’d and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas’d the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began.
The Secret Commonwealth is a tough book, lengthy (well over 700 pages) and with distinctly grown-up themes. Lyra is much harder to like than her earlier incarnation, and many will miss some of the first trilogy’s indelible characters – although, who knows, they may yet return in some sphere or other. Works of this nature manage to bend traditional rules of time and space, to thrilling effect. Yet it is still a true fantasia of imagination. Pullman has a unique knack for creating worlds that enthral and challenge as much as they can terrify, and this new and often challenging voyage into the great, unknowable world of “Brytain” is a compelling and fascinating read. It will undoubtedly sell in huge quantities, and it richly deserves to.
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