The Secret Commonwealth
Phillip Pullman 2019
Borzoi Book, published by Alfred A. Knopf
In his introduction to his second book in the Book of Dust series (and fifth in the His Dark Materials set), Pullman gleefully admits he swiped the title from a book called, “The Secret Commonwealth, or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the Most Part) Invisible People Heretofore Going Under the Names of Fauns and Fairies, or the Like, Among the Low Country Scots as Described by Those Who Have Second Sight.” Pullman wryly notes that it reminded him of the value of a good title. Nor does the story take place in the lowlands of Scotland, where “Black Pit of Despair” is a national holiday.
Since this is the fifth (and next to last) book of the series, spoilers will be unavoidable. If you haven’t read the first series and are avid to do so, stop here. No, really. It’s a lot more fun if you don’t know what happens next.
Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, have had a quarrel over Lyra’s infatuation with the writings of a Hobbes-like philosopher who deprecates the values of wonder and imagination. Pantalaimon, the impersonage of Lyra’s wonder and imagination, is not amused by this, and their relationship becomes tense. Imagine Ayn Rand and Jonathan Carroll sharing a flat. So Pantalaimon says “sod this” and takes off. Lyra and Pantalaimon have the ability to uncouple, something thought impossible in the The Golden Compass, the first book. They previously could not physically separate without becoming desperately and then terminally ill, and if one died, both died.
In the first book, the two have a sort of Calvin-and-Hobbes relationship. Pantalaimon is an externalization of Lyra’s inner voice, or soul. He is a compartmentalization of Lyra’s inner essences, and they work much like Calvin and Hobbes (except that Hobbes is wholly a product of Calvin’s imagination). In the second and most of the third book, Pullman is clearly at a loss to develop the relationship, making Pantalaimon something of a fifth wheel, and so introduces a radical change in the enforced nature of their conjoining near the end of the third book.
Book four, La Belle Sauvage, is a flashback story, to when Lyra and Pantalaimon are infants, and so both have passive and silent roles.
In the Secret Commonwealth, Lyra is an adult, nearing the age of 30. Pantalaimon is similarly adult, and permanently frozen in the shape of a pine marten. (Daemons are endlessly malleable in form until the human companion reaches puberty). The final, adult form of the daemon usually suggests something about the nature of the human; people with snakes are untrustworthy, those with large dogs tend to be vicious and authoritarian, and so on. If you see one with a golden monkey, run like hell!
So Pantalaimon takes off in an odyssey to find The Blue Hotel, which is a sort of home for wayward daemons reputed to exist somewhere in the middle east. Lyra, not surprisingly, employs parallel if not identical thinking to her twin, and in searching for her erstwhile daemon, takes a path on a similar trajectory.
Freed of some of the constraints self-imposed in the first two books, Pullman is free to explore the range and nature of the relationship between an adult human and that human’s daemon. While it varies from pairing to pairing, daemons can and do enjoy an autonomy of thought and feeling and perception. To belabor the Calvin-and-Hobbes analogy, Hobbes can disagree with and fight Calvin because Calvin, at least on an unconscious level, is bored and needs conflict in his life that can intellectually and physically challenge him. It’s understood (but never stated) that by the time Calvin turns nine, he’ll have outgrown Hobbes, and the stuffed toy will be languishing in a thrift shop bin shortly thereafter. In the case of Lyra and her daemon, his existence is autonomous save for the fact that the death of one is the death of the other, and this is not the story of a bored child trying to amuse itself.
In the meantime, the Authority is still carrying out it’s authoritarian schemes, trying to destroy the dust of a senile God and destroy any human agency that might defy it. Lyra, because of her unique nature, is a threat to the Authority. So there’s that.
Like Pantalaimon, the series, already the best YA fiction series out there, has matured and expanded, and adapted to the growing needs of the developing story.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it all ends.