A world of half-seen, half hidden things

Sunday, 26 January 2020

The cover of The Secret Commonwealth and my thumb.

I just finished reading The Secret Commonwealth (spoilers ahead), racing through to the end of the book along with Lyra as she races, tired and wounded, to the Blue Hotel aka Selenopolis aka Madinat al-Qamar aka Al-Khan al-Azraq. I should say up front that this post, unlike the last, is actually ABOUT The Secret Commonwealth which title Pullman credits to Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth. In short, the secret commonwealth describes the world of half-seen, half-hidden things; the supernatural, which has a more palpable, if increasingly uncertain, presence in Lyra’s world than our own.

In many ways, I’m happy returning to this world. I like Pullman’s work: dæmons as externalized souls are a way for me to conceptualize how to love myself (like, imagine that your soul was an animal that was always with you that you could talk to—harder to hate yourself, no?). And as I mentioned in the last post, the alethiometer feels familiar to an old cartomancer like myself. And in this book in particular, the tension between the rationalist philosophy espoused by Gottried Brande and Simon Talbot which so compels Lyra at the start of the book and the workings of the Secret Commonwealth, in which Lyra increasingly chooses to believe as she pursues her quest to find her dæmon resonates with me.

One of my favorite minor episodes contained within the overall arc of Lyra’s journey is her encounter with an alchemist in Prague [Really! This part has a kind of Rikki Ducornet meets Guy Madden’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs vibe.], which echoes her early interactions with another alchemist, who observes that if people think you are trying to achieve impossible, fanciful things (like turning lead into gold), they’ll leave you alone, allowing you to pursue work that might otherwise be construed as radical, seditious, blasphemous. The tension I discern between the rationalism and the secret commonwealth is not depicted simplistically and it actually makes up one of the book’s main arguments about choosing to believe in something and, in doing so, conferring a greater degree of reality upon it. The Secret Commonwealth is not an essay, it’s fantasy, which is a little like alchemy in that it allows the fantasist of degree of freedom from scrutiny.

As much as this is a fantasy novel, Pullman really engages with contemporary concerns: the rise of fascism, as the Catholic Church-like Magisterium is again united under a central figure; the refugee crisis, for instance when Lyra passes part of her journey on a boat that collides with another boat carrying refugees; the real risks of a disenchanted world.

For instance, I felt very stirred by the takeover of Oxford by a new master—a business administrator type, of course, not an educator—who capitulates to an emboldened CCD (a wing of the newly consolidated Magisterium) and allows members of the college staff to be questioned by and turned over to them. And these people, friends of Lyra in addition to some members of Oakley Street (a secret quasi-governmental organization opposed to the Magisterium—think Bletchley Park meets the Order of the White Lotus) resist. They refuse to acquiesce quietly. They fight back, and their fighting back against an apparently irresistible force was a reminder that the power of totalitarian oppressors gathers iteratively through all sorts of small moments of surrender. And that ordinary refusals, singly and in aggregate, are a mighty opponent. </soapbox>

While Lyra is driven by her desire to reunite with Pan, as in His Dark Materials, her personal fate is bound up with world-historical events. In The Secret Commonwealth, a lot of those events revolve around roses, which at some moments seem to be a kind of proxy for petroleum, with armed conflict breaking out over rose-growing and rose oil manufacture. They are also depicted as the subject of religious dispute. The vaguely drawn “men from the mountains” violently oppose rose growing, burning fields and killing growers, ostensibly because their scent offends the Authority (the name of the demiurge-like god in the His Dark Materials and Book of Shadows books). I’m curious about the geography of religion in this book. Are we meant to take this anti-rose group as a sect of the Magisterium? Although Islam is never mentioned, the arc of the book follows Lyra and co. from England through various points in Europe to places in the Levant (at the end of The Secret Commonwealth, Lyra is entering the Blue Hotel en route to Aleppo) where it is, at least in our world, a major religion. Visually and geographically, I felt cued up to interpret the group who takes the auditorium hostage as not just extremists, but ~Muslim~ extremists which felt, well, fucked up. Philip Pullman, if you’re reading, you’ve got another book in this trilogy, so I invite you to take this opportunity to clarify this. Are you trafficking in bigoted stereotypes or attempting to draw them out and critique them?

One of the ways Pullman establishes this world as other than our own, other than the obvious features like dæmons, is by variations in the names of places and institutions. In this book, Istanbul is still Constantinople. And Lyra ends up in the Antalyan city of Seleukeia—except that this was an ancient Greek city, not a contemporary Turkish one. Although the characters have journeys yet to make, their prospective itinerary is reasonably clear, including multiple sites in Central Asia, extending into China.  Here’s a map and some information about the correspondences between locations in the book and in our world. It’s worth thinking about the politics of a map and therefore about Pullman’s choice to establish the difference between his fictional world and ours in this way.

I think that Pullman is in some way trying to introduce a critique of the ills of multinational extractive capitalism (he does say that there is a petroleum potash and pharmaceutical company behind some of the intrigue) AND YET I can’t help but feel like it is super-imposed onto an orientalist itinerary that locates danger and magic in the Mysterious Orient! For instance, the Blue Hotel, which Lyra is desperately trying to reach in order to effect a reunion with her dæmon is depicted as someplace “over there”—spiritually and physically dangerous to reach as well as geographically distant from Lyra’s home in Oxford. And although Lyra’s dæmon Pan originally sets out for Gottfried Brande’s Wittenberg in search of Lyra’s imagination, his destination comes to converge with hers.

So, yeah, I don’t know! I’m as ambivalent as Lyra. I’m so glad this is a blog post and not an essay and that I’m not obliged to Conclude, except to satisfy myself. So much more to say about this book and maybe I’ll end up talking about it here soon or returning to it in time if I re-read it or when the next volume in the series comes out!