The Book of Dust, Volume two by Philip Pullman - review

Atheist novelist who loves myth-making
Melanie McDonagh3 October 2019

The Secret Commonwealth is one of those books that adults can read with as much pleasure as clever children but then Philip Pullman has form. The highlight of his trilogy, His Dark Materials, involved the Death of God — or rather, of the Ancient of Days, a dessicated idea of God: an ambitious endeavour (funnily enough, people invoke God quite often in this new book). And for admirers of that trilogy, this book’s heroine is the same Lyra, now 20 and at Oxford. The first volume in this series, The Book of Dust, was set 20 years earlier, when she was a baby; its hero, Malcolm, is here too, a stocky academic with a crush on Lyra.

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. His most celebrated conceit is a reworking of an old idea: that everyone has a daemon in animal form, a kind of Platonic companion that makes us whole.

Here we find the relationship between human and daemon is decidedly complex: adult Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, can’t stand each other. The crux of the story is when he sets off on a quest without her, for her sake. Then, of course, she sets off to find him. She’s not the upbeat character that the child Lyra was: conflicted, moody, sexual and still obsessed with Will, from her first adventures.

Where the first trilogy takes us to the magical Far North, this takes us in sharp order to the Fens, to Constantinople and the Levant and the mysterious deserts of the Near East. At its centre is a place where roses grow, special roses that have a bearing on the idea of Dust, one of Pullman’s very complicated metaphysical ideas about the nature of Being, which I couldn’t make head or tail of in the previous trilogy.

The Lyra stories revolve around a battle between light and darkness, between humanists and something called the Magisterium, or the Catholic Church as perceived by a febrile 17th- century Protestant. Except it is located in Geneva and its head was Pope John Calvin. It seems no pope came after him, and the Magisterium is now divided between power-hungry clericalist institutions, headed by cultivated villains, with some usefully dopey nuns and an unworldly ascetic thrown in.

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. JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis could have told him that much.

Growing up: Lyra, as played by Dafne Keen in the BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials
HBO

And so in this book, Pullman’s sights are set on a new and contradictory enemy: cold materialists, like the author of a newly fashionable book which has captivated Lyra, which disputes everything except what is scientifically evident, including daemons. Plus a novel popular with “clever young Europeans” called the Hyperchorasmians, which features “a young man who set out to kill God, and succeeded” — a bit rich from an author who himself killed off God.

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.

The Book of Dust, Volume two: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (David Fickling Books, £20), buy it here.

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