And another thing: one last post about The Secret Commonwealth
Art by Chris Wormell
A few final words on The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
Talking with my friends Luna and Art reminded me that there was more to say about The Secret Commonwealth [more spoilers]. Specifically, the book ends with two gruesome details. Over the course of her journey, Lyra has discovered that not only are more people estranged from their dæmons than she had previously thought, but that this has produced a trade in dæmons, with some people selling theirs in desperations. The other noteworthy event (content warning: physical and sexual assault) is that Lyra survives an assault by a group of soldiers on a train. It’s pretty rough and I’m not totally sure why it’s necessary to the narrative, except perhaps that it brings Lyra to her lowest point thus far, just as she finally arrives at the Blue Hotel, so in that sense I guess it is part of the architecture of the novel’s cliffhanger ending.
Lyra is in her early twenties in this novel. She is depicted, not graphically, as a sexual being. Of her friend Dick Polstead we learn, “Much more recently she and he had had a brief but passionate relationship and, what was more, parted friends.” And when Pan runs away, and Dick connects Lyra with his grandfather Giorgio Brabant, who will help spirit her away, Brabant asks, in so many words, if the Lyra’s trouble is that Dick has gotten her pregnant. This is all to say that Lyra, who from infancy has had a role in world affairs, is now being shown to participate in the adult world in other ways.
This wouldn’t have anything at all to do with her later assault, except in that Pullman really likes a manichæan struggle between good and evil: the secret commonwealth and those who believe in it versus the rationalist devotees of The Hyperchorasmians, Oakley Street versus the Magisterium, etc. This is also shown in the realm of individual ethics. Marcel Delamare’s pursuit of power versus the ordinary heroism of Alice Lonsdale. This leads me to wonder if this depiction of physical and sexual assault is intended to somehow counterbalance the consensual relationship depicted as having occurred before the narrative begins.
Another relevant seeming moment early on is when Farder Coram gives Lyra the weapon called Pequeno. After all, the chapter in which the assault occurs is called “Little Stick.” I appreciate that Lyra is depicted fighting back tooth and nail, and the exchange with the officer who stops assault feels disappointingly accurate:
“I have a ticket that permits me to ride on this train. It does not say that the journey includes assault and attempted rape. Do you expect your soldiers to behave like that?”
“No, and they will be punished. But, I repeat, it is not wise for a young woman to travel alone in the present circumstances…”
I have questions. Beyond the basic question of why it happens at all, why does it happen in Turkey (when it could as easily have happened, say, with CCD officers back in Oxford)? Why does the officer tell Lyra to wear a niqab? This goes towards the orientalism and Islamophobia I was talking about in the previous post.
As for the trade in dæmons, it feels more horrifying in Pullman’s world than in our own. The phrase “to sell one’s soul” doesn’t really pack the same wallop, although the easiest way to translate the word dæmon is with the word soul. But the demon is externalized in the form of an animal, so it is possible feel for them in the way that we would feel for them as we would for an animal. Communication happens by means of conversation, as if with another entity. And yet when a dæmon dies, so does their human, and vice versa. The dæmon both is and is not their person. It has the quality of a religious paradox, like (sorry: I was raised Catholic so I’m drawing from the personal well) the three-person god or the immaculate conception.
Once dæmons become separable from their humans, however excruciating this process and its aftermath are, they become fungible. So what we see at the end of the The Secret Commonwealth is the process of something becoming a commodity—and it’s pretty chilling.
A final note prompted by conversation with my friends: why is everyone good and evil is related? This actually spans the previous books as well (e.g. finding out that Lyra’s birth parents as Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter) but I think it feels a little stranger here because The Secret Commonwealth is trying to be both a geopolitical thriller and a fantasy novel. The underlying grammar of fantasy is often familial; its politics ultimately feudal. So, there is a tension here between Pullman’s impulse to ground the storyline in generational vendettas versus impersonal organizational greed or lust for power.
Okay. Whew. I think I have said my piece about this book. Coming up I’ll probably be talking about the books I’ve finished since, like Chely Lima’s lo que dijo el licántropo / what the werewolf told them (translated by Margaret Randall), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and Patricia Spears Jones’s A Lucent Fire. Stay tuned!