Pullman is a staggeringly gifted storyteller, and in The Secret Commonwealth his talents are on full display ... The novel gallops forward, full of danger, delight and surprise. Nearly miraculous, it seems, is Pullman’s ability to sketch character, place and motive in just a few lines; he has a rare ability to make us care about his creations, however far-fetched they may seem. I will not tell you of the plight of the Furnace-Man; I will tell you that you will weep when you discover it ... [a] terrific book.
Mr. Pullman is a storyteller, not a lyricist; his writing is clear, clean and forceful, never striving for effect and all the more effective because of it. He’s also a man of ideas, which gives great savor to his work even if the ideas themselves are not universally congenial ... Mr. Pullman comes across as notably less hostile than in his earlier books to the notion, if not the exact description, of a divine benevolence.
Pullman turns a shrewd eye to institutional corruption, the casual evil of complicity, the systematic subjugation of the poor and the vulnerability of women navigating a man’s world. Told through the alternating points of view of Lyra, her allies and her enemies, the novel is at once a gripping adventure story, a tense spy thriller and a dynastic political drama ... At over 600 pages, the story is neither brief nor straight to the point, but it’s well worth sinking into. It is perhaps the most overtly philosophical addition to a body of work already brimming with big ideas ... As always, Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. And it feels especially relevant to our times ... the author manages a delicate blossom of romance with a marvelously light touch.
Neither of these two villains is quite as effective as their predecessors, who could be genuinely terrifying ... while I occasionally found myself wincing as I read The Secret Commonwealth, the book always kept pulling me inexorably forward. And an enormous part of that pull is thanks to Lyra, who felt like a thoroughly modern heroine in 2000 and continues to feel like one now, nearly two decades later ... the deepest pleasure of reading The Secret Commonwealth comes from watching Lyra become more and more like the best parts of her child self, remembering how to lie fluently and commit herself to a quest with ferocious tenacity.
Readers of The Secret Commonwealth may feel a bit like Lyra: This return to Pullman’s world is at once a warm, comforting re-submergence into fantasia and a sometimes jarring, unfamiliar experience. Where the narrative force of Pullman’s earlier novels...was linear and propulsive, the plot of The Secret Commonwealth is intentionally twisted, even slightly frayed. It meanders, like Lyra’s journey, and we are often left with only hints about the machinations of venal politicians and the possibility of magic lingering in the margins. The story, just like Lyra, is more grown-up, more mature. Moral conviction is hard-won, and it never lasts. The ethical thing to do is to act, but also to keep on questioning what the right action even is ... What makes Pullman’s use of fantasy stories distinctive is that they are fundamentally a vehicle for secular truth-seeking. And if his plots tell us anything, it’s that truth-seeking and moral action are always a journey, never a destination.
... a big novel full of big ideas, big characters and big sorrows ... I was fascinated, occasionally contemptuous as the story had me siding with one character over another, and always curious to know more about the world and what would happen and always in awe of Pullman. This book feels like a response to the darkness in our time as Lord of the Rings feels like a response to the darkness in J. R. R. Tolkien's ... its greatest strength is the care it takes to center the story in the individual; the importance it grants to what's in our heroes' hearts ... stands well on its own ... Pullman's world-building is immediate and lived-in and vivid. It feels as if he is pushing on his borders, expanding them in ways I'm curious to see how he handles in Book 3. I'm also curious to see how he handles the ramifications of an extremely violent assault on a character. With so many threads in the story, that one felt unnecessary and it sticks with me like a hair in the throat ... My other — more minor — quibble is that, for all the richness of Pullman's world, most of the real depth and nuance belongs to our main protagonists. The villains are revealed as more human than they were in, say, La Belle Sauvage, possessing interesting and understandable motivations while being flawed in everyday ways, but we spend only a little time with them. It feels like they're also waiting for the third book before they get their due.
Pullman seems to be writing for those who read the HDM novels as children, but are children no longer. Lyra herself is naggingly conscious of what she has lost from the earlier books ... There is always plenty of dizzying travel in Pullman’s fiction, here more breathless than ever ... The satire of religious flummery is even more explicit and withering than in the original trilogy. Indeed, Pullman is more tempted to draw parallels with our world’s discontents than he has ever been ... Pullman has successfully turned his heroine into an adult by making her remember herself as a child, which also means remembering the earlier books that we all loved. But there is a downside. Previously, Lyra’s experiences and Pullman’s ideas were separate. As a child, she did not know what her story meant. Now she can ruminate in tune with the author’s purposes...This is Lyra thinking, but it is also rather too clearly Pullman speaking to us ... Imagination, the mysterious power celebrated by the Romantic poets, is the holy spirit of this book ... [Pullman] has created a fantasy world, made yet more satisfying in this new volume and pursued with his own special rigour and stylistic elegance. This is a book for getting older with.
Part of Pullman’s striking originality lies in his conception of a world like and unlike our own, in which human souls are visible as animals ... returns us to the energetic inventiveness of a master-storyteller expanding his creation ... violently enjoyable and enjoyably violent, but is also suffused with wonder, beauty, delicacy, perceptiveness, kindness, decency and romance. The writing is as exquisite as it is compelling. This is, in short, exactly the kind of novel that you give up hoping for when leaving behind the world of children’s literature for that of the adult.
Margaret Atwood could take lessons from Pullman; this is how you write a sequel that builds on and raises the stakes of an already well-established story ... a gorgeous and emotionally devastating experience.
It’s a rollicking adventure with a philosophical undertow, set in a fantastical universe. But it’s also shadowed by the specter of current events ... The Secret Commonwealth brims with perilous trips to far-flung locales, including Geneva, Prague and Istanbul. But there is also a new, adult, sense of unease.
... a darker and much bigger beast. With scenes of chilling brutality — including the brilliantly orchestrated assassination of a bewildered, elderly senior cleric and his attendants and, in another chapter, the attempted gang rape of a major figure — it is not a book for younger readers and the publishers are keen to point this out ... In a novel packed with multiple stories and inspirations, the most significant and moving element is that of the terrible estrangement between Pan and Lyra ... Engrossing storytelling aside, The Secret Commonwealth is a vivid portrait of the often painful transition to adulthood and autonomy, laced with a moral purpose that is not without ambiguity or doubt.
Lyra’s ennui makes her a sometimes wearying heroine to mooch around with. I wanted, at times, to give her a bit of a shake — remind her what she’d achieved as a kid. But Pullman’s cast list is long and there are others with whom to have a jollier time ... not as tightly woven nor as richly imagined as any in His Dark Materials. The stakes are not as high: Lyra is no longer battling for the liberty of humankind. And at times the book feels overly episodic, with too weak a drumbeat driving the plot — it can be easy to forget who is doing what and why ... Yet Pullman’s story is still thought-provoking. He is an unabashedly moral writer who uses his characters as mules for big ideas, from quantum physics to the nature of devotion. This book elegantly weaves in live issues, from Europe’s refugee crisis to facts in the post-truth era. And Pullman’s prose is as rewarding as ever — spare, but never cold; flexible enough to carry all the different genres he pours into his paragraphs: folklore, theology, romance and so on. At 700 pages or so the book asks a lot of its readers. But the chapters skittered enjoyably by for me and by the end I was grateful for the ride.
... parts of this book are quite distressing, and may not suit younger readers ... In this book there are intriguing characters, but none as memorable as Iorek Byrnison, Lee Scoresby or even Mrs Coulter, and no-one to rival the wild majesty of the witches. And as Lyra’s imagination is gone, as well as her ability to read the alethiometer, she is unable to cleverly deceive her enemies, as she managed in the first series ... However, her struggle to survive with every limitation imaginable makes for a compelling story. And we can guess – and hope – that her powers will return for the final installment.
There is much to enjoy in this new novel, and in some ways I want to be wholehearted, but I cannot. The joy of the first trilogy was transportation, to a different world of daemons and witches and armoured bears and ghosts and harpies and even things such as the sort-of-mechanical mulefa. This, like La Belle Sauvage, feels not so much like an invented world but a reflected one. In La Belle Sauvage it was flooding and eco-catastrophe. This time it is everything ... Although people might think of Pullman as a 'children’s author', this is written for the children that read His Dark Materials and have since grown up. What does retain the connective tissue, and what is far more significant than in La Belle Sauvage, is a rebooting of the mythological background to the books ... All of this is jolly rum fun. My reservation is that Pullman is too explicit in the contemporary concerns ... As I approached the final hundred pages of the book, I had goose-flesh. Not because of any narrative twist, and there are many, but because I realised that there was no way the strands would be tied. The fact that the last words are 'To be continued…' will dispirit some readers.
... one of those books that adults can read with as much pleasure as clever children but then Philip Pullman has form ... Pullman is a storyteller with a dressing-up box of any amount of battered treasures, from which he plucks all sorts of abstruse learning, old ideas, antique language and spelling ... What seems evident is that Pullman is aware he may have been gunning for the wrong target all along. Christianity is the Great Satan in these series, except as anyone who loves Blake would know, Christianity isn’t the impediment to the world of the imagination. Rather, it’s the underpinning for the things he values as a storyteller: myth, fantasy and fairytales ... It’s a cross, then, between AJ Ayer and Richard Dawkins with a bit of Nietzsche thrown in. But I’m afraid you can’t have it both ways. You can’t gun for Christianity and for logical positivists; you can’t have faeries and boggarts and be an atheist. Pullman’s grandfather was a clergyman; he’s still essentially CofE ... He is here in a bog of his own making, even if it’s a bog with lots of marsh sprites. But it’s still a cracking story.
That, certainly, was the girl we knew in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Yet a certain heaviness has descended. She feels as though she is dragging around chains .. The chief pleasures of this novel are those of recognition. First, there is gratification in seeing familiar characters at later stages in their lives. Secondly, readers of Lyra’s Oxford, a stocking-filler published for Christmas 2003, who puzzled over why a facsimile of a cruise liner brochure had been reproduced among the endpapers, and what was the meaning of the note handwritten on the ship’s timetable – well, they will have their curiosity satisfied. How delicious to recognise that the author has been laying a breadcrumb trail all this time ... Across almost 700 pages, however, The Secret Commonwealth is uneven. It too often reads like John le Carré fan fiction. Where Pullman excels is in set pieces ... This is not a bedtime story. Pullman depicts sexual assault, refugees in peril on the sea, and violent religious fanatics who seem modelled on Islamic State ... Pullman is confronting readers with the horrors of our own world reflected back at us. In The Secret Commonwealth he creates a fearful symmetry.
Pullman has left children entirely behind—they’re conspicuously absent, both in the book’s characters and themes ... Episodic spy-thriller/political-intrigue set pieces intercut what is often a meandering rumination on philosophy, as Lyra and Malcolm separately slink through a Eurasian underworld. Alas, for His Dark Materials devotees, not a hint of middle grade remains, and teens will likely find little of interest here; reserve this for grown fans who may relish the chance to catch up with Lyra and return to her ever-expanding world.
Pullman places his cast of white main characters in a Eurocentric world marked by rising authoritarianism, general anxiety, desperate refugees, and anonymous terrorists violently destroying rose crops in the name of a vaguely religious Holy Purpose. He skillfully weaves in deeper themes of change and of love’s complexities, ruminations on the nature of evil, evidence of magical truths beneath reality’s veneer, swipes at organized religion, and the powerful—if often twisted—ties of family. This entry, while well stocked with familiar characters in a story founded on ideas, is also not lacking in grand events and narrow squeaks ... Exhilarating.
The sprawling, sometimes meandering narrative follows Lyra, Pan, and Malcolm on their journeys while exploring the power of transnational religious and corporate organizations, the plight of various marginalized groups, and the importance of a worldview that includes unprovable truths. Lyra, Pantalaimon, and Malcolm are familiar yet altered by age; it is a pleasure to get to know them again.
