Das höre ich gerade ein zweites Mal um mich auf den letzten Band vorzubereiten.

Während andere Leser vergeblich auf „Winds of Winter“ und/oder „Door of Stone“ warten, bescherte uns Philip Pullmann vor kurzem den abschließenden Band seiner „Book of Dust“ Trilogie welche seine großartige „His Dark Materials“ Reihe fortsetzte.

Ab nächste Woche kann ich dann „Das Feld der Rosen“ zu betreten und darf ein letztes Mal Lyra und Pantalaimon folgen.

#philippullman #hisdarkmaterials #BookOfDust #books

Es gib ja Leser*innen die warten immer noch hoffnungsvoll auf
• Winds of Winter
und/oder hoffen endlich die
• Door of Stone
öffnen zu können.

Ich gehöre nicht bzw. nicht mehr dazu.

Ich erwarte mit freudiger Spannung Ende März ein
• Das Feld der Rosen
zu betreten und in einem hoffentlich würdigen Abschluss noch ein letztes Mal unser Lyra zu begleiten.

[Bitte keine Spoiler oder Kritik zur bereits erschienenen englischen Ausgabe, ich will vorher nichts dazu wissen]

#books #hisdarkmaterials

AO3 fandom metatags are back!

At long last, after a year’s worth of internal discussion and a few more months of preparing for the rollout, AMTs are back on the menu.

Two of my requests have already been approved! His Dark Materials & Related Fandoms and 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ | Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms are the metatags on a couple of shiny new tag trees!

Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)

A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.

Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.

Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.

Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)

#ArchiveOfOurOwn #HisDarkMaterials #MadokaMagica #tagging

All 10 references to Dust in the second Book of Dust volume

A thing I kept noticing in The Secret Commonwealth: any time someone brought up Dust, as in Rusakov particles, it went by fast. One character would mention it — another one might react — but then the conversation would move right along to something else.

The original HDM trilogy did a really solid job with this concept. Lyra first hears about it as one of many mysterious Scholar Things she spies on without understanding. When she gets a child-friendly explanation, it’s the Church-doctrine propaganda version. Readers follow along with her, and later with other POV characters, building out our knowledge as they hear more perspectives and see more experimental results.

There are good reasons Dust wouldn’t come up much in La Belle Sauvage. It’s a flashback, so even the experts are 10 years’ less knowledgeable, and young Malcolm (unlike Lyra) isn’t interacting with those experts much in the first place. If anything, the Rusakov physics in that book felt kinda shoehorned in. Bonneville is a Rusakov researcher, Malcolm finds his notes…then Mal keeps asking about it (even though it’s not relevant to surviving the flood, and he has no reason to expect it would be), and Bonneville keeps giving accurate answers (even though he has no motive to be honest, and every motive to make up something scary/demoralizing).

But TSC is a flash-forward. They have all the discoveries of HDM, plus another 10 years’ worth of research. A bunch of the main characters are professionally interested. This would be the point in the trilogy where you get to properly reintroduce Dust to the reader!

And instead…well, here are all the times it comes up:

—

(1) Chapter 5, page 76, a selection from Roderick Hassall’s journal as Lyra reads it:

Why is it necessary to investigate the roses? Because of what they show us about the nature of Dust. And if the Magisterium hears about what is here in Karamakan, they will stop at nothing to prevent that knowledge from spreading, and to do that they will come here and destroy the red building and everything in it; and they have armies and armaments in plenty to do that. The recent trouble in Khulanshan and Akdzhar is their work — no doubt about that. They are coming closer.

This seems like a perfect setup for Lyra to reflect on what she knows about Dust, and how long the Magisterium has been trying to suppress/distort knowledge about it.

And yet, nope. Doesn’t come up at all. She thinks she knows “something about that red building,” she reflects on her experience with daemon separation ordeals — and that’s it. If you didn’t remember HDM super clearly, you could come away from this thinking the red building was a callback to something on one of Lyra’s previous adventures, and this “Dust” idea was just being introduced for the first time.

(This also would’ve been a perfect setup for Lyra to refresh our memories about Mary’s suspiciously-similar work with lenses and plant oil…except that I don’t think Mary actually told her anything about the Amber Spyglass.)

—

(2) Chapter 8, page 146, Malcolm talking to Hannah about Hassall’s possessions, and rose-related violence:

‘There’s a scientific research station near there. Meteorology, mainly, but they cover a number of other disciplines as well. Anyway, they’ve lost a number of scientists, inexplicably. They just vanished. I did hear rumours about Dust,’ Malcolm said.

Malcolm is showing the journal to Hannah, so the idea is that it corroborates the rumors he’s already heard about Dust. But, again, we don’t hear anything about why it stands out to him as important.

Hannah even does a callback to Bonneville’s research! Which kid Mal didn’t understand when he got it, but Hannah did, and she’s been keeping up with the field over the 20 years since then. Shouldn’t she be able to give us some exposition about why it was relevant, which parts of it have been confirmed or denied by later research, what new discoveries have been made since…?

Yeah, no, she does none of that. She doesn’t even mention that Bonneville’s research was related to Dust.

—

(3) Chapter 10, pages 187-188, Malcolm at a debrief where Hassall’s botanist colleagues explain the effects of the rose oil (Dr. Stevenson is a particle physicist):

‘For those who haven’t come across it before, the Rusakov field and the particles associated with it are aspects of the phenomenon known as Dust. Which of course is not to be spoken about without the specific authority of the Magisterium. I’m assured by Lucy that you are all aware of the constraints this places on our activities. And our conversations.’

He looked directly at Malcolm as he said this.

Malcolm nodded blandly, and Napier went on: ‘Briefly, Margery Stevenson and I discovered that the oil on the lens made it possible to see various effects of the Rusakov field which had previously only been described theoretically. There have been rumours for a decade or so that something like it had been seen before, but any records had been systematically destroyed by — well, we know who.

The debrief gets crashed by Magisterium agents before anyone can elaborate.

If the writing overall was better, I would say this was a good set piece! We get teased with a few details (it’s the first mention of Rusakov!), then left in suspense, excited to discover more in the future. The interruption also makes you feel how tense and dangerous this is just to talk about, so it raises the stakes.

Trouble is, it doesn’t, you know…pay off. Still not even a hint about what this means to Malcolm in particular, either.

—

(4) Chapter 19, page 412, Pan confronting Gottfriend Brande:

‘I want to know about Dust,’ said Pan.

That startled Brande. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then seemed to recollect that he was trying to ignore Pan, and looked away again.

‘Tell me what you know about it,’ said Pan. ‘I know you can hear me.’

‘There is no such thing,’ Brande muttered, looking at the floor.

‘No such thing as Dust?’

‘No — such — thing.’

(5) Same chapter, bringing it up again, on pages 413-414:

Pan said, “Tell me about Dust, now you can talk.’

‘This is dust,’ said Brande, sweeping his hand along a rafter and blowing on his fingers to disperse it. The grains whirled meaninglessly through the air and sifted down to the floor.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Pan. ‘You just refuse to believe in it.’

‘It does not exist. Belief and disbelief are both irrelevant.’

‘And the scientists who discovered it? Rusakov? And the Rusakov field, what about that?’

‘A fraud. Those who claim such things are either deluded or corrupt.’

I’m being a little generous to count these as two separate mentions. It’s the same conversation. My feelings about the whole thing all go together.

Gottfried here is a philosopher-turned-novelist. Why does Pan expect him to know anything about particle physics? Why, in particular, would he know about developments that are being actively repressed by the Magisterium? And why would Pan expect Gottfried’s knowledge to be useful or relevant to his quest in any way?

Some missed opportunities for setup:

• If the plot of The Hyperchorasmians had mentioned Dust, possibly as another concept the protagonists had to destroy for being too irrational
• If it had some other sci-fi concept that Pan and Lyra talked over, and realized was a fictionalized version of Dust
• If Pan and Lyra’s general arguments about the novel had led them into arguing about Dust, so the concepts were at least linked in Pan’s mind
• If, at minimum, the “irrationality” of Dust came up on his list of “opinions Lyra never mentioned that Pan gets mad at her for anyway”
• If Pan had worked up some kind of theory about “Lyra’s inability to appreciate beauty/feelings/imagination is because her Rusakov concentration is being drained, and Gottfried is doing it somehow”
• (Hard to see this being any more convincing than his “Gottfried is stealing her imagination with a magic spell” theory, but at least it would be a reason for Pan to bring Dust into it)
• If readers even had enough info to infer that he could be cooking up a theory like this
• (We know from HDM that Rusakov particles react to consciousness, self-awareness, intention — but that hasn’t been re-established in TSC at all. And, more importantly, Pullman hasn’t established how much of it Pan knows/remembers)

And even if all the groundwork had been laid…if Pan had excellent and well-established reasons to confront this particular guy about Dust…how does Gottfried’s response follow from what we know about him?

He’s the “It was nothing more than what it was” guy. If he knows about Rusakov particles, his reaction should be “That’s just a meaningless phenomenon we happen to have scientific measurements of. It has nothing to do with silly, irrational notions like ‘creativity’ or ‘feeling’. It’s just lines on a screen, numbers on a dial, non-standard effects in a visual field. Projecting your own fanciful beliefs all over them won’t make them into anything more than what they are.”

—

(6) Chapter 20, page 446, for some reason Lyra brings it up with Magician Dad:

‘Tell me about Dust. You know what I mean by Dust?’

‘I have heard of Dust, of the Rusakov field, of course I have. You think I still live in the seventeenth century? I read all the scientific journals. Some of them are very funny. Let me tell you something else. You have an alethiometer, do you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘The alethiometer is not the only way to read Dust, not even the best way.’

‘What other ways are there?’

‘I will tell you one, that is all. A pack of cards.’

Lyra’s turn to interrogate some random guy, even though she has no established reason to expect him to be a physics expert.

Again, we can use details that haven’t been mentioned since HDM to backfill a theory Lyra could be working from, here. Asriel came very close to killing Lyra after he magically summoned A Child to murder, for experiments that had to do with Dust. Magician Dad here claims he just magically-summoned and then murdered his own kid for an experiment, so maybe his purposes are also Dust-related…?

But the current book doesn’t have Lyra make any of those connections. She’s briefly reminded of Asriel, then immediately moves on without any reflection on why. And it’s not like Asriel would’ve explained true/helpful facts about his Secret Church-Forbidden Science Knowledge to any random person who walked in, anyway. So why would Lyra expect that here?

On top of all that — Magician Dad clearly knows things without being told, and is a little smug about showing it off. Why didn’t Pullman just have him bring up Dust, without any prompting? Could’ve had the exact same lore dump, but with a realistic amount of wariness and opsec on Lyra’s part.

—

(7) Chapter 21, page 469, Olivier Bonneville when he’s captured by Magisterium agents, and is haughtily intimidating them into feeling bad about it:

To start with, the connection involves Dust. Got it? You understand that? You know what that means? My father was a scientist, as they call them now. An experimental theologian. He was investigating Dust, where it comes from, what it means, the threat it holds. He was killed and all his notes were stolen, and so was his alethiometer. The girl Belacqua knows something about it, and so does that Polstead man. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m doing.

Vague, unhelpful, tells us nothing new — but in this case it’s justified. Olivier is bluffing like hell, pretending he knows way more than he does, and going for shameless lies whenever that suits his purposes more than the truth.

It’s a good character moment. I’ll take it.

—

(8) Chapter 23, page 504, Lyra contemplating to herself while on the ferry:

And Dust? Where did that come in? Was it a metaphor? Was it part of the secret commonwealth? And the burning Dutchman! What would reason say about him? He couldn’t exist. He was a delusion. She had dreamed it all. It hadn’t happened—

About 2/3 of the way through the book, this highlights that we still have no idea what Lyra [thinks she] knows/remembers about Dust. It’s only come up in two other scenes she was in: a passage she read in a book (where she had no reaction to the word), and the time she asked Magician Dad about it (where it wasn’t clear why she asked, how much she already knew, or what she hoped/expected to find out).

“The burning Dutchman” is Magician Dad’s victim. This might be the only scene where Lyra goes into 100% denial of her own experiences — not just “I don’t have the right explanation for this thing I saw,” but “I didn’t even see this thing I saw.”

It doesn’t make a ton of sense here, and it makes even less if she’s trying to apply it to her experiences with Dust. So many other people have shared and corroborated those experiences. It’s an elementary particle that people in multiple worlds have measured with scientific instruments! Where’s the sense in writing that off as some kind of mass delusion? What would it be “a metaphor” for? This is like wondering if electrons are a metaphor.

—

(9) Chapter 24, page 536, Olivier responding to being interrogated by Malcolm:

‘The oil from that place has got various properties that [the Magisterium] haven’t got to the bottom of yet. They need a larger sample. I got hold of a tiny amount — I know a girl in the Geneva laboratory, and in exchange . . . Well, she gave me a piece of blotting paper with a few drops on it. I found out one thing straightaway. It protects against the nausea in the new method. With enough of it you could use the new method and never suffer the ill effects. But I only had that little bit.’

‘Go on. What else?’

‘You know what they mean by Dust?’

‘Of course.’

‘With the oil, they can see that. And lines of power. Or fields. Maybe fields. The girl in the lab said it was a field. And they could see not just chemicals and kinds of light but human interactions. If Professor Zitski had touched this specimen but not that one, he showed up somehow, because they could check it against the other things he’d touched. And Professor Zotski would have his mark on it too, if he had. If Zotski had been thinking about the thing, or he’d ordered how the experiment was to be set up, he’d show up in the field.’

…I want a workplace buddy comedy about Professor Zitski and Professor Zotski now.

This is Olivier talking again, so it works for his character that he’s only registered the details most relevant to his work/interests, He has no idea how the Rusakov field is related to free will, or daemon intercision, or angels, or any of the Magisterium’s past operations. (He…might not actually have noticed that the alethiometer works by reading Dust, come to think of it.)

That said, it’s a little exasperating that Malcolm doesn’t seem to get anything from those details. He doesn’t pick them up and fit them into his pre-existing knowledge. He doesn’t fill in any long-standing gaps, or come to any shocking new realizations, or update and refine his predictions about the Magisterium’s goals.

With other things Olivier brings up, Mal does that! With the Dust-related intel, it kinda doesn’t make a difference that it came up at all.

—

(10) Chapter 27, pages 575-576, Lyra contemplating again while people-watching from a hotel:

And she found herself thinking about roses and Dust. The street below her was saturated in Dust. Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it; it made everything glow as if it was touched with gold. She could almost see it. It brought with it a mood that she hadn’t felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Lyra remembers relevant details about Dust that haven’t come up all book!

She doesn’t connect them to anything either. No reminiscing about how she learned any of this in the first place, or why that memory would make her feel so good. No speculation on which parts might have been discovered by the travelers in the mysterious red building. No reflection on why the Magisterium is so hell-bent on suppressing it. Nothing at all.

This whole thing isn’t my biggest complaint about the book. Not even close. But it sure is weird and frustrating, and I don’t care for it!

It almost feels like Pullman isn’t actually interested in Dust anymore — he’s all about roses now. (Parallel to how he’s bored with the alethiometer, and wants the characters to play with myrioramas instead?) He works in a handful of mentions of it, because he put it in the title of the trilogy, so he can’t just forget it exists…but they’re all so brief, in passing, and none of the characters are interested in dwelling on why it’s even worth bringing up.

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-Listen Liveblog: The Secret Commonwealth, chapters 23-33 (end)

Roundup part 3 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen. It’s the last 6 hours, and it took 4 work days to get through. (My hold on The Rose Field was 4th in line when it started, and now I’m up to 2nd.)

No cute critter photos in this one. We’re just slouching toward the finish line to be done.

Chapter 23:

Lyra’s boat ride away from Constantinople: it’s as if, all of a sudden, Pullman noticed he forgot to show any of the bad behavior Pan was mad about.

So Lyra starts reminiscing about a bunch of mean things she was definitely saying/doing right before the book started. Picking on a classmate for not understanding something! Haughtily refusing to go to an art exhibition! (Not just any art, though. Religious art.) Actual problems, the kind that organically follow from “a person who’s fixed on logic while forgetting the value of kindness.”

I wish Pan had said he was mad about specific things like this. Or that any of them had come up, at all, during his silent lonely stewing about how mad he was. It also stands out that Lyra isn’t regretting anything she did during TSC itself. Nothing the readers already knew about, where we might have been waiting for the narrative payoff of “we can already see this is bad, will Lyra ever realize it?”

Lyra also now connects this to “whether you believe in things that can only be seen with imagination,” then, again, sorts a random set of her own mundane/physical experiences into that category.

Thinking about how, in Will’s world, daemons are invisible by nature. Will’s daemon was physically pulled out of him at the Final Shore. (Jopari’s too, when he crossed the daemon-separating tundra the witches use.)

Mary, though, used a “seeing with imagination” trick to meet hers. Someone like Mary would’ve been ideal to go through an “I can’t see my daemon with ordinary vision, is he even real?” emotional journey.

So, Pullman, why are you trying so hard to give that arc to a character from the world where “daemons are by-default obvious to ordinary senses” is a defining feature?

We even met a blind girl who interacted with Pan, to make it explicit that she can’t see him without ordinary vision. (But can hear him with ordinary hearing.)

Ferry crashes into an unlit boat full of refugees. This is an ongoing thread I haven’t mentioned, a wave of Middle Eastern people fleeing to Europe to escape the rise in rose-associated violence.

Turns out Alison is on the same ferry, and has disaster-management experience! (Really wish she’d been established as Oakley Street, so this was payoff instead of random luck!)

Lyra briefly ends up with a baby. I do like the symmetry here. She was once the lost baby, separated from her family, needing safe passage on a boat in the care of kind strangers. Paying it forward.

Alison, in between directing 30 other things: Change its nappy. Have you ever done that?
Lyra: No!
Alison: Well, it’s common sense, you’ll figure it out!

❤

Lyra has charge of an older child now, maybe 5? Wraps her in a blanket, gets her food, rocks her and sings her nursery rhymes.

The child’s daemon cuddles up to Lyra for warmth. Another parallel I really like, echoing baby Pan kneading on Mal’s bare hand.

I do wish “Lyra’s daemon is MIA” came up as a problem here. Someone getting mad that she’s too “disfigured” or “unwell” to be trusted with a child. Someone afraid she’s a non-human taking advantage of the chaos — say, a baby-stealing faerie? Someone else panicking based on a distorted rumor about the link between “separated people” and “the specialest roses”, and think Lyra is dangerously connected to the exact violence they’re fleeing in the first place.

(The kid notices the next morning, and shrinks away in fear, but that’s all.)

Chapter 24

Back with Mal, at his next travel stop. Officials go through his papers and call his contacts to make sure he’s a real scholar. Glad to see that kind of security prep coming into the plot a bit.

Olivier tries to tail Malcolm, Mal turns the tables and tails him, big confrontation.

For once, this is really suspenseful and satisfying! Mal’s “interrogating someone with lies and intimidation” skills, and Olivier’s “lying and intimidating his way out of an interrogation” skills, have both been well-demonstrated on-page. Pitting them against each other is a great payoff for that!

Also: it’s not weirdly-straightforward exposition with no codes or precautions. They’re both constantly throwing bluffs and half-truths at each other. The narration doesn’t call them out for us, we can spot them ourselves, based on the context that’s been set up in earlier conversations!

I know in some ways this sounds like Basic Good Writing. But it’s been so pointedly absent, in so many earlier scenes. It’s just kinda wild to be slammed out of nowhere with “hey, remember that Pullman is actually good at this?”

Sidenote: Olivier just…comes right out and says he thinks Delamare is a siscon. That’s pretty funny.

(I do wish it was set up with something like “when Olivier gets Force-visions of Delamare’s creepy stalker board, he sees that the room also has an even creepier Marisa shrine.)

Chapter 25:

Lyra in Greece, seeking the woman from the address book that Kubiček flagged as “a helpful daemonless person.” Called a Princess, grandmotherly age, big expensive estate, lives alonwme except servant(s).

Lyra acts like a witch to get admitted, but once inside he’s back to openly explaining her real backstory.

Princess: There’s a lot you’re not telling me
Lyra: I don’t know how long you’ll be interested
Princess: Does my life look super exciting to you? Do you see anything more interesting that I could be getting back to? Come on, spill

The Princess’s separation story is fascinating. A kind we’ve never heard before. Her cat daemon fell in love with a sexy lower-class chorus girl (who was their brother’s side piece at first, oh dear). Princess herself is not in love…but ends up running off with the chorus girl, for her daemon’s sake.

Or so she says. Pretty sure this is the first mention in the whole series of queer people existing. I assume homophobia is still big in Magisterium-controlled society, it’s just that the anti-gay narrative has some extra twists to accommodate how, in most cases, “woman falls in proper godly hetero love with a man” includes “woman falls in love with the visibly-female aspect of that man.”

So this raises the prospect that a woman could go “I’m not that sort of person! It’s only my male daemon who fell in love. Any feelings I maybe appeared to have were all faked for his sake.”

Still scandalous! It’s what people believe about the Princess, and she’s still in disgrace! But different scandalous. And maybe different in a way that’s more manageable.

Separation, at last, when the Princess wanted to go home. Her daemon was clinging to the chorus girl as the Princess dragged herself away.

Adding “addiction” to our info about daemon injuries/ailments: The chorus girl’s own daemon wasn’t into the romance either…and coped by getting into opium. Supposedly, since the girl herself didn’t take it, she wasn’t affected! (Though she died young, so maybe it was a factor, who knows.)

The Princess has a photo of Olivier. Says she’s his great-aunt, on his mother’s side.

Not the first reference to Olivier’s mother…and every one has left her unnamed. Another moment when Lyra probably should’ve asked some follow-up questions, huh.

Chapter 26:

Malcolm meets with a contact, gets taken to a conference of rose-growers, right on the day when armed Magisterium agents show up and bolt the doors.

Remember Delamare’s whole “convince the people to not even care what truth is” plan? It’s not part of this at all. The Church enforcers are doing the classic “there is an Objectively Knowable Will of the Authority, which is that God hates roses. If you want to be good obedient Authority-fearing Christians, get out of the rose business. If that abstract fear isn’t enough of a motivation, we’ll start shooting protestors, until you’re all afraid of us.”

Okay, the resolution of this is weird. The leader shoots one farmer, orders a round of hostages brought to the stage. Malcolm volunteers as tribute, manages to catch the leader behind a curtain, breaks his neck, and sneaks out.

And then there’s no more violence at all? The other enforcers find the leader’s corpse, and are so at a loss for how to cope that one charismatic guy in the audience says “Hey, let’s all talk this out” and…they just do?

I did like how the sneaking part played out. Lots of “Asta uses their separation to go scouting, at distances a normal daemon couldn’t handle, so nobody would expect it.”

But outside, when Mal hears the talking, and no shooting (yet), he figures “guess that’s all settled” and goes to the pub! No calling in allies to make sure everyone gets out safe. No summoning the press to put a spotlight on this aggression that the Magisterium is clearly trying to keep silent. Mal’s local contact is still in the theater, and Mal doesn’t even stick around to be available if it all goes sideways and that guy needs help. He just. Goes to the pub.

The crowd fully forgets about the big red-haired man who was on-stage a moment earlier, and disappeared shortly before they found a dead body. Someone says “maybe this death was an angel carrying out divine providence?” And everyone (except, I assume, Mal’s contact) gets talked into believing it.

Seriously?

Idle speculation: maybe Pullman started this with the plan that it would devolve into a mass shooting. Then either an editor came down on it, or he started second-guessing it on his own. “This is getting too real. I’m not sure I have the skill/experience to write it in a way that feels sensitive and respectful to readers who have survived this kind of violence IRL. And it’ll weaken the story overall if I fumble something this heavy. Better if I just don’t go there.”

But instead of reworking the whole scene, he kept the exact same buildup, only to have it fizzle out in this improbably peaceful way.

(Again, I have no idea how likely this is. Just a train of thought I went down.)

Chapter 27:

Lyra gets a hotel room in town, goes people-watching. Reference to a daemon smoking (sharing with its human), two others sharing a bag of nuts.

Cut to Pan, somewhere rural, finding a daemonless girl. She was a refugee on the boat we saw earlier (mentions a sister, and it’s the girl Lyra was caring for). Got swept away from her daemon. Made it to shore, but alone.

For the first time, Pan brings up the idea of visiting the Blue Hotel, on the grounds of “your daemon might end up there, and we’ll be less conspicuous if we travel together.”

Back to Lyra: visits a café mentioned in the murdered man’s papers, and gets approached by Bud Schlesinger, an American spy who appeared briefly in LBS. (He found the “maybe Malcolm also has a super special fated destiny” prophecy.)

For the first time, Lyra exchanges Oakley Street code phrases with someone! Finally, that comes up as a thing!

The Magisterium has an arrest order for Lyra; Bud recognized her from a school photo they’re circulating. Gets his wife to help change her look (haircut, dye, fake glasses).

[Note from the future while editing this post: Pretty sure those Magisterium wanted posters are never mentioned again after this chapter. If Lyra is ever at risk of being caught and turned in, the readers never know.]

I did sigh when Lyra thought “can I trust him? My enemies might have found out these code phrases to trick me.”

Honey, you have trusted every random person you’ve run into. Why would the enemy bother with that much spycraft? All they have to do is be superficially nice, and you’ll follow any stranger to be alone with them anywhere!

Lyra to herself, during a chat with Bud’s wife where she goes into all kinds of personal backstory: This woman would be an irresistible interrogator, she makes people want to tell her anything

…honey, no, you are the world’s easiest interrogation subject.

Look, this is fine as a character point. With Pan gone, she’s desperate for a trusted companion that she can tell anything. But with all the self-reflection and realization she’s done in the last few chapters, I wish it had come up by now. Or I wish either of the trained spies she’s getting advice from had picked up on it, and warned her.

Mal wrote a letter to Lyra and sent it c/o Bud, which is wildly lucky. Unless Mal sent copies of the same letter to multiple agents in the region?

…but he also put Lyra’s non-coded name on it. Right on the outside of the envelope. Brightly flagging any recipient as “a person to monitor if you’re trying to catch Lyra.” Back in “lol what even is opsec” territory.

So, ah, the chapter ends with Bud’s building on fire. Which is well-deserved as “serious consequences for how sloppy they all are at secrecy.” I just wish they’d made the enemy work for it, you know?

Chapter 28:

Lyra sneaking to the train station. Her whirling thoughts include “Pan, why did you go to the Blue Hotel?”

She still doesn’t know he is going there. It’s just “the only idea she had.” Has she forgotten it was a wild guess? (Has Pullman forgotten…?)

Passes some temporary refugee housing. Thinks that people torn away from their home countries have the same “un-whole, they’ve lost something essential” vibe as people torn away from their daemons.

That’s a strong parallel. I like it.

Thinks about her witch backstory again, and reflects that she doesn’t have a passport in her witch alias. Now that you’ve mentioned it, Pullman, why didn’t you go back and edit in that Coram hooked her up with a fake ID? One with a photo of a bird daemon, even? You had such a good scene where Mal’s papers got scrutinized at a border! Why didn’t the spy characters prep Lyra at all for something like that?

Friendly stranger on the train asks if Lyra is a witch. Again, she leans on that backstory, only when someone else guessed. He says he had a romance with a witch once. Notable that he addresses Lyra as “young lady,” though he should be keenly aware that a witch of Lyra’s appearance could be decades or centuries older than him.

He has a pack of picture-cards. The prediction ones that are totally different from tarot. And he just leaves the deck with Lyra! No instruction on how to use them, doesn’t even mention they can be used for prediction at all. I guess he just heard the foreshadowing, noticed we’re nearing the end of the book, and figured he’d better pay it off quickly or nobody else would get around to it.

I don’t get why Lyra thinks “I’ll draw these cards, free-associate meanings based on the pictures that come up, and expect to get real information out of that,” when she can’t or won’t do that with the set of pictures she’s been carrying around for all of TSC.

With the alethiometer, you need training and reference books to understand the symbology…or you can just ignore the symbols and channel Force-visions, but that’s bad and makes you sick. With the cards, there’s no limits or prerequisites, they’re just supposed to work? All while they’re so cheap and easy to make, people will just hand them out for free to strangers on a train?

This is so unsatisfying. I remember it not getting any better, either.

[Note from editing: I was right.]

Lyra thinks, “If free will is real, then I can choose to believe this works.”

Seriously? Shades of Delamare’s “we will convince people the truth doesn’t matter.” Who cares what is true? Anything you want to be true, just go ahead and act as if it is. That’s your right as a free person!

It also calls back to that fear I had reading LBS: that Pullman wants to imply the real problem with the Magisterium is that they’re the wrong religion, and the good moral thing to do is to fall in line with the correct religion. Oof.

Catch-up notes, added at home later:

Chapter 28 had this passage, which I wanted to bring up when I could include a screencap of the full thing. It’s the first (and only?) time all book when Lyra considers an idea I wanted to see much earlier: If she’s having an existential crisis about “what if daemons are fake and the universe is dead,” why not worry about herself being fake and dead?

So, hey, here’s the worry!

I do wish it connected more to…well, anything. Lyra doesn’t get here as the culmination of a train of those other thoughts, it just comes up out of nowhere. It doesn’t lead her to any breakthrough realization, either, like “when Talbot argued that daemons aren’t real, he was building up to this.” She just moves along to experimenting with her newly-acquired deck of cards.

She does think “I can choose not to be skeptical about these cards,” and you can see the parallel to “I can choose not to be skeptical about my consciousness.”

…But it’s not a great one. Lyra got these cards five minutes ago! Her only reason to think they might be predictive is, one shady magician told her Dust-reading cards exist! And he also said there are scam cards with no special powers at all, so if she “chooses to believe” in a deck of those, she’s sunk.

I also wish the weight of this had been hanging over Lyra all book. Wish we saw her almost-stopping her journey, because hey, if there’s no meaning and nothing is real, why is she making all this effort? (Wish she kept having to avoid the thought of, if there’s no meaning and nothing is real, she had no reason to abandon Pan on the Final Shore in the first place…)

Another note: the chapter title is “Myriorama”, which I had to look up, it’s a word for this kind of deck of picture-cards. The art lines up on the edges, so you can arrange them in any order and they’ll always form a continuous landscape. A myriad of panoramas.

It’s a cool idea. I understand Pullman wanting to give his characters this specific thing to play with.

Still don’t get the “but tarot is a scam for gullible idiots” part, though. I even went looking for myriorama tarot decks, and hey, people have made those!

Chapter 29:

The department that oversees Oakley Street moves to shut it down. Staff quietly follow a pre-arranged plan to get all their stuff independently secured.

The Magisterium is driving this, and the rhetoric is that OS is “counter-modern.” I’m trying to think of any IRL situation where the framing was “the organized Church is the cool cutting-edge modern leader.” Haven’t come up with any.

Sure, there are other groups that have used “we are The Future, fall into line with us if you’re not a tradition-worshipping scaredy-cat” to intimidate people into supporting their agendas. But they’re modern corporations. Occasionally, an up-and-coming cult. Never an established religion that’s been in power for hundreds or thousands of years.

The outgoing head of OS talks with an ally about the Church’s interest in “some mysterious resource in the desert.” The vagueness does come off as, okay, Pullman is leaning into a “let’s make up reasons to invade the Middle East for oil” parallel. But I’m surprised these well-connected characters don’t seem to know it’s roses. Talk of rose-related violence is all over the place! They haven’t put two and two together yet?

Another hint at pharma profits. Pullman, please, quit teasing us, just let somebody discover what this rumored medical use is.

Mal visits Bud. You know, I think Pullman is just bad at writing spy-movie action scenes. They visit a co-worker of the murdered man from chapter 1, now injured and staying at a safehouse in care of a nurse. She poisons Bud with something temporary that wears off fast, poisons the sick man with something that kills him but slowly enough he has time to give Mal good intel, flees without even trying to poison Mal. He gives chase, she shoots him in the hip…then, instead of (a) shooting until she gets a better hit or (b) finishing her escape while he’s blatantly unable to chase, she just shoots herself.

That poor sick guy should’ve been far too drugged to say anything useful. Bud should be super dead right now. The nurse should’ve made an easy escape once she got that far away…not that she should’ve managed to drug one spy and then just walk out the door in the first place, with the other spy totally oblivious.

Mal: Why was your house firebombed? Did someone know Lyra went there?
Bud: No, we weren’t followed, and besides, everyone already knew where my house was

My dude, that means an enemy wouldn’t need to follow you around, just have someone with a sharp-eyed daemon (or binoculars!) stake out your front door.

I don’t even read spy thrillers! Why am I thinking of angles that these supposed professionals aren’t?

Mal gets on a train, ends up passing out from his injury. Oops.

(He and Asta also read and discuss this fantasy epic poem. It’s come up before, so I expect it to come back again later.)

[Note from editing: Okay, it didn’t. It’s called Jahan and Rukhsana, and this isn’t a cameo by a real piece of our-world literature, it’s an epic love/adventure poem unique to Lyra’s World. Doesn’t do much in the book except hammer in how important roses are, and give us some lovely imagery that’s probably foreshadowing, considering that it lines up with all the other foreshadowing.]

Chapter 30:

Alice! She gets to be in the book at least one more time! Oh good.

CCD comes to Jordan to interrogate her about Lyra’s trip. Alice is delightful, hostile and unimpressed, bringing back the full sarcasm and acid-tongued mockery she got so good at as a teenager.

CCD agent: I believe you know more than you’re saying
Alice: Oh? Is it true, then, just because you believe it?

Alice staking a strong position on the side of “you don’t have some inherent right to just believe anything, regardless of the facts.”

Getting in front of witnesses, yelling, “Tell everyone. Tell Norman and Barry!” Which one of Alice’s friends interprets (correctly) as “tell the Polsteads,” since those are the names of the ornamental peacocks at their pub!

That’s a better bit of opsec than most of Malcolm’s scenes put together.

Mrs. Polstead immediately thinks to check in on Hannah, who by then is in the middle of having the CCD raid her house. (So, hey, awesome, we also get more Hannah.)

This is one of the confrontations that works really well! Nobody’s armed with anything fancier than a poker, the agents were expecting to prevail on pure intimidation, and as soon as Hannah gets enough allies to outnumber them, it’s only a matter of time before they lose their nerve and slink ways. Especially with Mrs. Polstead doing her own round of “being too loud and righteous for them to get away without any witnesses.”

Alice’s friend gets fired over all this. Alice herself ends up disappeared in a rail car with other undesirables. In a particularly sadistic touch, their daemons are kept in cages under their seats.

It’s awful. And it’s so much more grounded and real than all the too-neat, too-convenient escapes we’ve been seeing with Lyra and Mal. There’s weight to it. There are ongoing stakes. The enemy is a competent and organized threat.

Probably not enough pages left for Alice to get an equally-well-earned rescue scene, huh.

[Future editing note: Nope. This is the last we see of Alice, Hannah, or any of the Polsteads — the previous chapter was the last we saw of Malcolm.]

Chapter 31:

Oh, joy, it’s the SA chapter. Lyra ends up on a train with a group of soldiers, presumably on their way to join Delamare’s Rose Inquisition…and a bunch of them attack. All the easy escapes, lucky coincidences, and conveniently helpful strangers she’s gotten throughout the book, why do this much of a tone swerve at all? Why like this? What does this add to the story, the message, the overall themes?

And who’s going to be the gratuitous assault victim in the third book, because it sure seems like Pullman is going for a pattern, here.

Lyra, thinking: “Oh, Pan, are you satisfied now?”

Oh yay. Finally, an example of Lyra mad at Pan for a viewpoint he’s never claimed or suggested in any way. Just the narrative symmetry I was hoping for. Good job, book.

Okay, some notes on other thoughts I had this chapter…

• Today Lyra pretends to be French. Recites lines of memorized poetry, in order to seem fluent. I assume it’s a real poem, I’ll look it up at some point
• Pan used German at the school for the blind. Noted that they studied it via German poetry. He held a real conversation, though, didn’t just quote
• Lyra’s travel prep should have included “packing some Language For Tourists guides.” She’s been so reliant on “finding an English-speaker to help me,” and why? All these long international train/boat rides would’ve been a great time to drill herself on handy Arabic vocabulary

Lyra had one monumental advantage in the fight scene. She was Literally The Only Person There who wasn’t vulnerable to the pain of “opponent touching your daemon.” And she doesn’t use it! The narration talks about how furiously and violently she fought back, but this doesn’t occur to her, even in the aftermath. Why not? Either “at least I didn’t stoop to their level by grabbing their daemons” or “dammit, I should’ve tried grabbing their daemons” would have been a valid reaction as far as I’m concerned — she just should’ve had some reaction about it.

…Especially for the contrast to the Alice scene!

After Bonneville used daemon-touching as a power move to make an assault worse, if Lyra’s scene has flipped that around, with her using it as a power move of desperate self-defense…

Look, I’m not saying it would’ve redeemed the sequence for me. But. There would at least be a note of “okay, Pullman, I can see how you are trying to Do Something with this.”

As-is…yeah, no. This just sucks. Full stop.

Follow-up about the poetry:

The two French poems Lyra quotes. First one is “Le Cor” (The Horn) (as in, a hunting horn) by Alfred de Vigny, 1825. Lyra quotes the first and last lines.

Couldn’t find a line-by-line English translation of the whole thing. Here’s my attempt to do these two, in a way that conveys the meaning while still sounding poetic:

J’aime le son du Cor, le soir, au fond des bois
(I love the cry of the horn, in the dusk, in the deep of the woods)

Dieu! que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois!
(My god! how the cry of the horn has such grief in the deep of the woods!)

The second poem is “Correspondances” (Correspondences) (as in parallels, echoes, resonances) by Charles Baudelaire, 1919. Lyra quotes the first two lines, and that page had a dozen different English translations, so pick your favorite. It’s also about being in a forest:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles
(Nature is a temple, where the living columns sometimes breathe confusing speech)

Chapter 32:

Lyra arrives in Seleukeia, which in our world is in Iraq. Can’t find a hotel or any English-speakers, ends up sleeping on the street. Found and taken in by…the daemonless caste? Sure wish she had a vocab book. They can’t share their separation backstories at all. Accidents of circumstance, like Kubiček? Irreconcilable differences, like the Princess? Or forced somehow?

They gift her a Muslim-style head scarf. Only hint we have so far about how Islam is doing in this world.

[Note from editing: And it’s the only one we’ll get. No further hints about how Judaism is doing in this world, either.]

Lyra finds a church with English on the signs, goes in seeking help. You’d think she’d hesitate at least a little. How many loyal Magisterium agents work there?

English-speaking priest says the people who took her in were Tajik. Most of the daemonless caste are. Not allowed to travel in daylight, and forced to go by numbers instead of names. He finally spills the backstory I was suspicious about: there’s a black-market trade in separated daemons. Poor parents (so, mostly ethnic minorities) will sell their children’s daemons for survival money.

On the one hand, it fits the worldbuilding that a trade like this would exist. On the other, I’m probably thinking too hard about the logistics, but. Most daemonless people, like Kubiček, couldn’t afford this. Some, like the Princess, could, but wouldn’t want it. (It’s not like having a kidney transplant! You don’t have to look the new kidney in the eyes and be indifferent to its pain afterward!)

Maybe they’re also selling to people like Magician Dad, or even the Bolvangar researchers. People who aren’t looking for a transplant, just a test subject.

Quick mention of “medical companies.” Can the specialest rose oil be used to non-fatally separate daemons, and that’s why they’re buying it up? Is the Church bankrolling this, so they don’t actually care if the daemon-selling side turns a profit, they’re just doing Bolvangar again?

Priest also gives Lyra a heartwarming speech about “the Authority never wishes for His creations to be split apart.” Pullman is making a point of depicting “religious people who actually do good things as an expression of their faith,” following up the nuns in LBS. I expect this priest would keep trying to support and care for people, even if he found out the Authority was dead. That’s a real kind of person, so it’s nice to see them included in this world.

But whoo boy, is it darkly funny for him to be giving an uplifting speech about the love of God to Lyra.

Priest points Lyra to the hotel where the daemon-sellers find customers. She gets a room. People start visiting, with business cards, sales pitches, product photos.

One of them cites Gottfried as a happy customer! Lyra hasn’t met the guy, so she’s wary, but we saw him through Pan’s POV, and yeah, that perfectly explains the weirdness around his daemon.

I have so many follow-up questions. If only Pan had stayed around to chat with the dog, instead of leaving after getting cryptic nonsense from the human! Why did she leave her original human? Was it a choice, or forced? Was Gottfried calling her by her own name, or using his original daemon’s name and expecting her to answer?

I still suspect Gottfried of doing a “self-induced separation ordeal to prove daemons don’t matter,” and that’s why his daemon peaced out. So why does the “replacement” daemon stick around? Or could it be the other way around: that he lost his daemon first, and started writing “daemons aren’t even real” stories/treatises as a coping mechanism?

Does anyone in his life know about the swap? I expect his miserable self-isolation is to limit the number of acquaintances who could notice. Does his maybe-daughter know anything?

None of this is ever going to be answered, is it? The one separation case that isn’t just “a human just tells us the whole backstory, Lyra takes it at face value,” and it goes all the way to the other extreme, of “readers aren’t shown enough to put the story together for ourselves, and we never will be.”

Yay.

Anyway. Some credit to Lyra for not telling that priest her real name and backstory. Even if his intentions were pure, she has a little discretion instead of immediately sharing everything, that’s good.

In another book, I’d be wondering if his stance of “I can’t tell you about this daemon trafficking business, I shan’t, I mustn’t…okay, I’ve told you, but I shouldn’t have, please don’t go anywhere near it” was a front, and he’s a feeder for this industry, in a way that gives him plausible deniability. In this book, any advice Lyra trusts has turned out to be honest and on-the-level and not manipulating her for the adviser’s own purposes in any way.

Almost like “It was nothing more than what it was,” huh.

Chapter ends with Lyra hiring a guide who can take her on a camel ride to the Blue Hotel.

Or so he says. There’s nothing to stop him from knocking her on the head, taking all her stuff, and leaving her in the sand to die. Lyra doesn’t check his trustworthiness with the alethiometer, or with the cool new cards that are totally better than an alethiometer. And you’d think the whole “out of nowhere, SA!” interlude would’ve had some lasting effect on Lyra’s willingness to be alone with male strangers.

But nope.

Next chapter is the end of the book.

Time for me to rediscover how much it leaves unfulfilled…

Chapter 33:

Lyra’s guide tells some stories about the creatures in this region, including a camel-like species that parallel the panserbjørne: they have language and culture, but their daemons are internal.

[Note from editing: they’re called bagazhkti, and the HDM wiki doesn’t mention them showing up in TRF, so they may or may not be as real as the armored bears are.]

Sold her a salve for her injuries, which seems to help. Stray mention of it being rose-based, because of course.

Reference to period cramps. Oh, good, she’s not pregnant. (The assault scene didn’t appear to get that far anyway, but it’s nice to have confirmation.)

Mention of Lyra still being “in the grip of university philosophy” like Talbot’s. Never mind that she hasn’t been shown believing or following any of his principles for chapters now…

They arrive at the ruins of a city, at night. Lyra decides she’s going in.

Cliffhanger ending, which spends the last five minutes bringing back two more plot threads so we can cliffhang the set. Olivier tracked Lyra here, planning to shoot her. The guide stops her, with a cryptic warning about “a great treasure that only she can take us to.” (Hah, some ulterior motives! About time.) And Lyra finds the teen girl Pan met after the boat wreck! If she got here (somehow??), we know Pan could get here. But is he? Or any other daemons, for that matter? Tune in next book to find out!

…I’d love to have some kind of profound wrap-up statement here. But everything I think of to say is just “repeating and re-emphasizing things I’ve complained about already.”

So, yeah. That was it. That’s the book.

One last note:

I finally had a chance to reread my original reaction post.

There are some details I missed or misremembered that time around. Example, I had forgotten that Malcolm actually took the initiative to kill the enemy leader at the not-shootout (although, considering the total lack of consequences it gets him, can you blame me?). Or, with the Tajik couple that took Lyra in overnight, I mentioned “their house” when it was a cart (big enough to live in, but still).

But my overall reaction was basically the same! I was broad-strokes frustrated by the same set of issues. So, yeah, I stand by it.

#HisDarkMaterials

Re-listen liveblog: The Secret Commonwealth, chapters 11-22

I found a good cutoff point — about 2/3 of the way through the book, even! — so here’s Roundup Part 2 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen.

It’s hella long. I did try to put some effort into “if I could edit this to have a more consistent plot and be more thematically-coherent, how would I fix it?”, instead of just going “and THIS was handled badly, and THAT was handled badly, and THIS TOO was–” over and over.

Also, I broke it up with cute daemon photos.

Chapter 11:

Lyra wakes, finds Pan missing, goes to her part-Gyptian friend/ex for help. He picks up in seconds that she’s walking around daemonless. People in Lyra’s World notice that instantly.

But also, he already had a feeling she could separate! Worst. Kept. Secret. Ever.

Goes to the ex’s Gyptian grandpa, says she’s in trouble and was sent by his grandson…he assumes she’s pregnant. Awkward. But good worldbuilding.

Interlude with Marcel Delamare. He’s arranging a series of murders to destroy the Special Rose Oil production. Reference to the oil being in demand from medical companies, not the first hint of this, but we still don’t know what medical uses it has. Just the Dust-seeing ones.

Mal finds Lyra missing from the pub, loops in Alice and Hannah. Awkward bit where Hannah asks if he’s in love with Lyra. (I don’t think he was showing it, just the high level of concern anyone would have, if a friend goes missing while being pursued by murderers.)

Anyway, Hannah assures Mal his feelings are totally fine, moral, and ethical. You can feel Pullman staring straight at the reader as he writes this part.

[Note from the near future, as I’m compiling this roundup: as of chapter 22, Hannah and Alice haven’t appeared again. Won’t spoil myself by checking, but if this was their last scene before disappearing from the book, I’ll have some “oh no, not again” feelings.]

Chapter 12:

Gyptian grandpa — name is Giorgio, his daemon is a Keeshond —

— tells a fable about the death and rebirth of the moon. Almost 1/3 of the way through the book, and finally a reference to “the Secret Commonwealth” of mystical beings. Now, for the first time, Lyra’s POV thinks this kind of thing is a foolish fantasy, and her favorite novelist wouldn’t approve.

She didn’t (and still doesn’t) apply this dismissal to any of her own adventures. Even tells Giorgio about her canoe ride through Fairyland with Alice and Mal!

Feels like Pullman only decided to give Lyra this opinion at a later stage of drafting TSC. So he added in some mentions of it, but never did a deeper edit/revision of the conversations he already wrote, where it didn’t come up.

Olivier does another vision-trance, sees that Delamare has a board full of surreptitious photos of Lyra. Decides this isn’t professional interest, this is creepy stalking. Valid.

Mal tracks down one of the murderers, gets some fresh intel. Talbot, who wrote the “what is meaning, anyway?” nonfiction Lyra likes and Pan hates, is involved…somehow. Hm.

Again, the narrative implies Pan’s hatred of the book is Correct. See, the author is probably evil!

We still don’t know much about the content, aside from the pseudo-deep “what if phones are a shared delusion?” part. Haven’t gotten anything from Lyra about why she [thinks she] likes it, either.

Chapter 13:

Cut to Pan’s POV. Now he stews over Lyra being “condescending” at things she used to respect, because of the hated books.

Which things? Who knows. Does this make sense as displaced anger over “she abandoned me on the Final Shore out of condescension”? Not really.

Anyway, he’s off to confront the novelist in person. Sure. (I do remember being hella unsatisfied with how this subplot ends.)

Oakley Street interrupts Mal’s search for Lyra by sending him to investigate the rose mystery. Because they know he can already separate. Worst. Kept. Secret…

Return of Mal’s migraine aura. Still not doing anything plot-relevant, but nice it hasn’t been forgotten.

History of how the Magisterium stopped having a pope. Delamare is steering them to re-condense their authority. “Pope Delamare” is definitely his endgame goal here, huh.

Boat gets Lyra to the fens, the wetland area where the Gyptians live. Sees will-o’-the-wisps. For the first time all book, Lyra actually does this thing Pan was mad about, telling herself “That can’t really be [magical being], it must be [mundane explanation].” As always, of course, it’s way less magical or mysterious than a hundred other experiences Lyra has had.

A Magisterium zeppelin flies overhead and attacks! Lyra almost instantly stops doing the thing, and Jedi-mind-tricks the marsh-lights into fighting it off for them.

This could’ve been a powerful (if cliché) moment if it was “Lyra finally lets up on the doubt/denial she’s been angrily clinging to all book.”

But it’s not.

And, ah…she does effectively murder everyone on the zeppelin. Which she recognizes! And feels terrible about!

Could’ve jumped from there to “that has to be a non-magical coincidence so I’m not really responsible for their deaths.” Just like she could’ve jumped to “the Final Shore has to be a dream, so I didn’t really abandon Pan.”

But she doesn’t.

Again, feels like there was a draft of this scene where Lyra’s denial/doubt wasn’t a plot point. So she had a few lines of it pasted-in somewhere in the middle, but the rest of her thoughts/actions weren’t revised to integrate it at all.

(This is such a frustrating book.)

Chapter 14:

Lyra’s ex (his name is Dick) finds the Trout, gives Malcolm some exposition. (Also, hears more about Mal’s travel plans than you’d expect of a secret agent…)

I do like the exploration of “how a mixed part-Gyptian guy lives in mainstream society while keeping a connection to his heritage.”

Pan sneaks onto a boat. Misses Lyra, but his new complaint is that she’s lost “her ability to appreciate beauty.” Which of their fights had anything to do with “Pan appreciates a beautiful thing and Lyra refuses to”? He’s mad about her admiring the un-beautiful books, but idk what he wants her to admire instead. He’s mad about her not appreciating him, but it’s not “she doesn’t bask in my beauty.”

Delamare at Conclave. Talbot also there, to “report on” events. Relevance TBD.

Olivier tracks down the intel that Delamare is Mrs. Coulter’s little brother. Reference to her starting “some kind of organization.” The League of grade-school spies, or the General Oblation Board?

Also gets Lyra’s name here. So Delamare has a creepy photo board of his niece. Awkward.

[Pictured: Olivier’s daemon, a sparrowhawk]

Chapter 15:

Reaching the gyptians. Nice to see Lyra reconnect with old friends.

Lyra: You once said I had witch-oil in my soul. What did you mean?
Ma Costa: lol idk (but it looks like I was right, huh)

I like this. Young Lyra took everything these adults said as very serious, profound, wise. Adult Lyra finds out “Oh, sometimes they’re just yapping.”

Coram: Did they tell you about Oakley Street?
Lyra: What?
Coram: [infodump]
Malcolm, via letter: BTW, have Coram give you the infodump about Oakley Street

It’s not even in code! Opsec, never heard of it.

Mal’s letter also says “You know, through the alethiometer perhaps…that there are more ways than one, more than two, of seeing things and perceiving their meanings.”

Heeeey, isn’t this evil Talbot’s philosophy? From that other book Pan hates? Makes good upstanding alethiometrists feel sick? Hmm.

Chapter 16:

Plotting with Coram about how Lyra will pass herself off as a witch while traveling. Seems the obvious thing to do. I expected people were assuming that already…but a full fake backstory to go with it can’t hurt.

Bringing up “Lyra can’t just improv this kind of story anymore” as a plot point for the first time. And it’s just Lyra claiming she can’t.

This would’ve been the time to demonstrate! Have Coram ask what her story will be. See that Lyra stammers and flails. Finally he goes “okay, never mind, let’s get out the atlas and workshop it.”

(And of course, would be even better if this was paying off an arc that had been…you know…set up at all. If Lyra had struggled to come up with the little lie at the police station. If Pan had urged her to lie their way out of some other trouble, and Lyra, at a loss, fought with him instead.)

Lee Scoresby apparently read “On Bullshit”, taught it to Lyra.

Coram: There will be Oakley Street agents in unexpected places to help you
Lyra: But how will I know who they are?

Well, ah…precedent suggests they’ll just come right out and say, “Ever hear of Oakley Street? Yeah, I’m from that.”

[Pictured: a cat that matches the description of Coram’s daemon]

Coram advises Lyra to imitate Will’s power of disappearing. Even though that’s something she has been doing throughout the book.

Lyra: “All we ever did was kiss. At that age, that was enough.”

Pullman staring directly at the audience again. This time at the readers who went “eww, you wrote 12-year-olds having sex!” about the kissing/cuddling at the end of TAS, because they just wildly projected more onto it.

Coram says to avoid doubters of the Secret Commonwealth, but also to avoid those who “take it literally, and think you do too.” Back to “being open to ambiguity is good actually.”

Lyra finally opens the Talbot book.

Chapter 16, The Part Where I Just Dissect The Talbot Book:

Lyra starts at the “phones aren’t real” chapter. Society has organized itself around the massive conspiracy of convincing everyone that phones exist.

Why do they seem able to send signals to each other? Our psychological yearning for connection. Why do they appear to have different backgrounds and cases? A projection of the human’s tastes and preferences. Why do these things seem to change regularly for some phones, and rarely for others? It represents how those humans have more malleable internal landscapes. Now that I’ve explained all that, surely you find it easy to believe phones aren’t real, right?

If I wanted Talbot’s idea to make any sense, I wouldn’t have him deny an obvious physical reality, but a mental one. Inspired by IRL cults that tell their victims things like “if you feel abused, it’s because of a problem within yourself that you’re projecting. So don’t blame the ‘abuser’, fix yourself.”

Have Talbot claim “talking to your daemon is unhealthy.” (Self-absorbed, even!) Or “if your daemon questions you, it means you’re insecure, you need to get confident so they stop.” Lean into the SA apologism that so many cults do: “If you don’t want your daemon touched, you’re too repressed and closed-minded.”

Wishing we had gotten that instead! But no.

Lyra also has a moment of thinking “If Spectres were real…”

Girl, you saw them soul-murder people! You mentioned them earlier this chapter, and not as a fantasy or a metaphor! When and why did you ever get the idea they weren’t real??

Lyra wonders “The question was, was the universe alive, or dead?”

Rusakov theory is, all matter is conscious, and the Rusakov field/particles are the effect of that consciousness on basic physics. Pullman is pointing us at “the universe is alive.”

What I don’t know is how Lyra is connecting “if phones are real, the universe is alive.” I could understand her going “if Dust is real, the universe is alive.” But…she already knows about Dust. And that’s not even “a physical reality that’s easily perceived by the non-enhanced senses of any human,” the way daemons are.

Lyra has yet to question whether she is real. Why is her existence any more or less plausible than Pan’s? Why would a “dead universe” still have room for her, but not him?

I know, I know, none of this will ever get addressed because the whole thing is a poorly-thought-out mess.

It’s stressful how badly I wish it wasn’t a mess! But boy howdy, it sure is one.

Chapter 16, the rest of it:

Olivier not turning in much new alethiometry. At first I thought he was sabotaging Delamare for being a creep, but it turns out he’s really not getting much. Thinks Lyra has “found some way to block” his surveillance.

We know Lyra isn’t doing it on purpose. Side effect of something else she’s doing? Or is it somebody else’s block?

Delamare boasts to his sick mom about how the Church will discredit Amber Spyglassing, by making the public give up on “truth” mattering at all. Suddenly very aware this book was written in the Trump era.

Why they can’t just lean into a doctrine-compatible explanation for the Dust the rose oil makes visible, I have no idea.

Marisa had one a decade ago! Ran a whole authoritarian death-camp system based on it, even! Is Delamare just that determined to show up his sister by doing something different?

Chapter 17:

Pan reaches the end of his hidden journey, Lyra starts a crowded one. Almost halfway through the book, our first actual example of “Lyra wants to lie her way out of trouble, but can’t come up with anything.”

Isn’t this what they prepped a whole witch backstory for? She only mentions it later, after it’s guessed.

Frets that she lacks “inventiveness” or maybe “chutzpah.” Hello, tiny hint of Jewish people still existing in this culture, will you ever get a follow-up?

Angry train guy scolds Lyra for “going out in public” with “that degree of disfigurement.” Says there’s “places” for people in her condition. (I think this bit does get a follow-up…)

Coram gave her a Brazilian weapon called “pequeño” (it’s a lil’ club), which either he or the audiobook reader doesn’t know how to pronounce.

Some Welsh miners rescue her. I figured they’d give her an Oakley Street codephrase, but no! Still, she immediately trusts them, not even considering they might be helping her in order to con her. Pulls out the alethiometer! Shares real intel about it! At least she agrees when they ask if she’s a witch, and sticks to that cover story, but still, oof. Honey, why.

A couple Magisterium officials confront them…and Lyra immediately, easily, confidently spins them a lie.

“I haven’t had to do anything like that in a long time,” she tells the guys once it’s over. “Glad it still works.”

She had to do it ten minutes ago, and couldn’t! She doesn’t think about that, doesn’t ponder what changed, doesn’t have a single moment of “guess I haven’t lost my inventiveness after all” or “Oh, Pan, if only you were here to see that!”

Again, it’s like the two scenes are from very different drafts, and were pasted next to each other with zero attention to continuity.

Olivier deduces that the New Method fixates on the daemon. Pan is away from Lyra, ergo he can’t get Force-visions of Lyra, only Pan. So much for “abandoning the single fixed point of view,” huh? This is more fixed/limited than a classic reading.

Chapter 18:

Malcolm comes to check out the Conclave, and his visual aura leads him to an abandoned boat. Finally leading him somewhere plot-relevant that he wouldn’t have found alone?

Finds Talbot in a café, sits down for a kind of obnoxious confrontation. “If there’s no such thing as a single objective truth, then what stops you from lying in court, huh?” Checkmate, atheists!

I’m reminded very hard of Coram’s warning against “people who take your words too literally and think you’re stupid.”

[Pictured: Talbot’s daemon, a blue macaw.]

At least Mal walks away knowing “yeah, I lost that one.”

Talbot is also the “certain things are definitely not real” guy! He has all the villain flags, I assume he’s being disingenuous on purpose, ergo he’s not going to suddenly go “Ah, you have bested me, I see the error of my logic” to an earnest argument!

(If he wasn’t villain coded, I’d interpret the inconsistencies as, he takes different approaches in different chapters for the sake of exploring thought experiments. You know…philosophy.)

Ah yes: Mal needs to make a speedy exit from the city, he goes to steal that boat.

Chapter 19:

Pan arrives in the German town where the novelist lives, finds a school for the blind, says “my human is just over there, can you help us get an address?”

More on the theme of daemon physicality: Pan isn’t even worried that the blind student’s daemon might see his lack of human. Does this mean a human born blind will always have a daemon born the same way?

(Note that sighted daemons aren’t restricted by the bounds of their human’s senses like that. Owl daemons have owl-level night-vision, not human level.)

Couldn’t a human be blinded by an injury but their daemon be unaffected? When we saw amputation/paralysis on daemons, it wasn’t mirrored on their humans. The mobile human carried her paralyzed daemon around, you’d think a sighted daemon could guide their blind human.

[Note from editing: Autocorrect turned this into “blond human.” Very helpful.]

Pan finds a student who’s hiding so she can read an “adult romance” in Braille. The hated novel must be available in Braille too, because her school explicitly banned it. Claims it’s “dangerous.”

Gonna take a bold stance, here: Banning books is bad! If you’re not the villains, don’t do it!

I know, I know, so controversial yet so brave.

…So, okay, this novelist. Gottfried. (A name meaning “God’s protection.” Irony!)

Everything about him is meant to be weird, creepy, off-putting. He’s rude to the hired help. Cold and controlling with maybe-his-daughter. His daemon, a big dog, is so submissive and nonverbal…if “people can tell daemons from animals on sight” hadn’t been stressed early on, I would’ve been dead sure the twist was “his daemon had also run away, this is just a pet dog.”

He isn’t putting people under magic spells and stealing their imaginations. (That was obvious, right…?) So Pan mostly ends up interrogating Gottfried about his own backstory. Very little info in the guy’s replies. My memory is that none of them get satisfying answers later, either.

Pan says daemons aren’t real in The Hyperchorasmians. That’s only been mentioned as a detail in Talbot’s book before. Why didn’t it come up explicitly in Pan’s fights with Lyra? Or in any descriptions of the plot? Seems like “a story about heroes without [visible] daemons” would specifically remind Lyra of Will, and would be a major point of appeal for her! Even before you get to the “also, they kill God” part.

Gottfried can separate. I think the implication is, he forced a separation ordeal on his daemon, to prove a point about her unreality, or at least her un-neccessity.

But. He gets all pompous about how fear is useless, belief is useless. And there’s never any big Villain Speech about “see, I proved daemons are useless!”

So…???

I was never sold on Pan’s quest. Maybe I should feel validated that it got him nothing. But surely Pullman expects us to get something from it all, yes? And I don’t even know what he’s trying to convey.

Do other people have theories? Somebody out there connected with this, right? Please: tell me why!

[Note from the future: Unless it involves spoiling something that happens after chapter 22! If so, tell me in the final roundup post.]

Catch-up notes I wrote the next day:

• New Pope is a sweet, frail old guy. Too kind and shy to abuse his new powers, or make anyone think he was a bad choice! Maybe Delamare’s goal is “be the evil grand vizier who has the real power”? Or maybe he plans for this guy to die soon, free up the spot.
• Alethiometer got stolen (again). Lyra doesn’t even notice until the miners give it back. Thus why I figured they were either Oakley Street, or stole it themselves as the first step of a long con…I made the One Ring comparison last book, it doesn’t get lost if it doesn’t want to, but it got stolen from Lyra in The Subtle Knife. She remembers going on a whole mini-quest with Will to steal it back. That was good drama! This, in contrast, just feels too convenient.
• Mal mentions that the hated novel “gives people an excuse to be selfish.” Again, shades of Ayn Rand. But then he goes “surely Lyra wouldn’t have done that.” Again, almost a tacit admission from Pullman that he isn’t actually showing the terrible effects this book is supposed to have on Lyra.

Think that’s everything I wanted to touch on. Onward…

Chapter 20:

Montages of Lyra’s trip across Europe. Spots two other humans without daemons along the way, one proud and defiant, one cringing and ashamed.

Her aim is a city called “the Blue Hotel”, rumored to be populated by daemons without humans. Un-subtle color contrast with “the red building” in the daemon-separating patch of desert, where the specialest roses grow.

[Note from editing: the Blue Hotel has Arabic names, which, after referencing the ebook version, I now actually know how to spell: al-Khan al-Azraq, or Madinat al-Qamar.]

Pan hasn’t so much as thought about looking for the Blue Hotel. It’s just the only idea Lyra even has.

In Prague, meets Kubiček, rep for a little group of daemonless people. Also, it turns out his name is in a list Pan got from the murdered man. Thought for a second it might be a list of “people who can separate, like me.” Then remembered Makepeace was on it, and he can’t.

Why didn’t Lyra just organize her trip around “trying to visit the addresses on the list” in the first place? Pan went to see Makepeace after spotting his name there. It would make sense for Lyra to theorize “maybe he’ll try to visit the others.” That would be a much better lead than “idk, possibly apocryphal place with no clear location that we never talked about.” And it would still get her to Prague.

It was even established by Makepeace that the addresses are in geographical order! Perfect setup for a quest of working through them, west to east! So why not pay that off?

Kubiček says the stock separation backstory for his group is like Mal’s: forced by some emergency to go two different places, got lucky enough to survive it.

Bizarre little sidequest with a guy who was experimented on as a child, specifically before his daemon settled, by his father. Strong parallel to how Lyra’s mother also needed unsettled children to experiment on.

The test turned this poor guy into a fire elemental. Wears asbestos clothing, can’t go in wood buildings, keeps needing handfuls of dirt to smother the flames he gives off. Daemon became a water elemental…and, we see later, settled as a mermaid! Guy is in the middle of his own daemon-finding quest, and got a supernatural tip that Lyra could help.

They track down a suspect magician/alchemist. Mention of him speaking a maybe-spell in “what might have been Hebrew.” Another tiny passing hint that a Jewish community is in this world…somewhere! Pullman, please, give us backstory on where Lyra would recognize spoken Hebrew from?

So, the magician is the dad. He reminded Lyra of Asriel, and he’s doing a parallel “needed to sacrifice a person to kickstart a project of his, used some mysterious power to have the plot steer one in his direction.” Lyra bringing him the fire guy was her bringing Roger Parslow to Asriel all over again.

[Note from the future: Rereading these notes, I don’t think “I am their father” meant he was literally their bio-dad’s alter ego all along. I think he meant “because my powers railroaded them into their final form, I consider myself responsible for their creation.” Very Khonshu-coded. He never clarifies, and Lyra asks no follow-ups, but that’s my headcanon as of now.]

Unlike Asriel, this dad isn’t bothered at the prospect of his own child being the sacrifice. Fire guy hugs water daemon, they explode into steam, it starts some kind of special engine, Magician Dad is satisfied at a job well done.

Why the convoluted multi-year setup, with a fake sale and a chase to Prague? No idea.

Lyra questions the magician. Not about his work. About her own quest, the red building, where Pan is. He gives a bunch of answers! Condescending ones, but utterly confident! Lyra apparently takes them all as true.

Why trust for a second that this guy, who lied and plotted his own child’s murder for cold self-interest, is being honest now? Or answering in a way that will benefit Lyra, not “hurt her as much as necessary to benefit himself”?

Also no idea. Lyra doesn’t consider it at all.

Could be satisfying if this backfired on her later. As far as I remember, it doesn’t.

Also, the magician said Gottfried’s novel was stupid and wrong. Really feels like Pullman wants this to auto-flag him as “a wise person on the correct side” to us. No matter how red every other flag is.

Maybe I’m wrong. But my hopes sure aren’t high.

Kubiček never has time to share contact info for other daemonless people. He does ID one, at an address that’s already on Lyra’s list. Could’ve been an encouraging bit of validation if “check all the addresses” had been Lyra’s quest here already.

One more thing: The magician gave foreshadowing about a special “deck of cards with pictures” that can be used to read the truth, same as the alethiometer is.

But not tarot cards! Those are a scam to prey on gullible idiots! These are the good fortune-telling cards with pictures. Totally different.

This meshes very weirdly with so many themes this book has leaned hard on. Believe in fantastical things! Be open to the mysterious and the unseen, even when you don’t know the logical explanation. Don’t be a skeptic who closes off your mind. Everything in the living universe has more meaning than it appears on the surface!

Except tarot. That’s a dumb scam for dummies. Be as much of a rationalist skeptic as you want about tarot.

(Idle suspicion: Pullman wrote this to just be tarot decks at first, same as he wrote the real-world I Ching being useful for alethiometry in TAS. Then some editor said “you need to do more research on real-world tarot to write this accurately.” And he went “nah, screw that, I’m inventing my own symbol-card deck! With blackjack and hookers!”)

(No idea how realistic this is. It’s just funny to imagine.)

Chapter 21:

Olivier tailed Pan’s visit to Gottfried. A CCD agent tailed Olivier. Scramble as Olivier tries to get Pan, then the agent gets Olivier in turn.

Olivier didn’t plan to touch Pan, he brought a net. The agent just grabs bare-handed. Oof.

Less time has passed than I realized; Mal’s still on that stolen boat out of Geneva. New companion: guy who was hired to visit the desert and retrieve rose oil for Delamare. Still hasn’t been paid, and now figures he’s not likely to be. Also, sussed out that Delamare probably plotted the destruction of the research station.

He says the rose oil isn’t a great psychedelic because it hurts too much. Notes that doctors use it for “some chronic conditions.” Glad the early mention of “pharmaceutical companies” hasn’t been dropped.

Olivier to his CCD captors: “My father was a scientist, as they call them now. An experimental theologian.”

Old term vs new term! Still suspect this is a retcon, and in LBS the use of “science” was just an editing error, but hey, I’ll take it. (If I was Pullman’s editor, I would’ve said “have Mal’s POV reflect on the newness the first time it comes up.”)

Olivier pulls out his own lie-spinning skills. Intimidates the CCD into thinking they’ve misunderstood their orders to capture him, it’s all secret codes that they don’t have the Magisterium clearance for him to explain, poor fools. I like this! Adds to the whole Kylo Ren “dark mirror of Lyra” vibe he has going.

Note that, even with Olivier being all-in on the New Method, and using it heavily on this trip, he hasn’t “lost his imagination” to improvise a good lie on-the-spot.

(Pan just…breaks free and takes off while they’re all arguing. I like that too.)

Chapter 22:

The title just comes right out and spoils which death flag is about to pay off.

New Pope’s daemon is a philomela nightingale. “Lover of song.”

This poor man is so senile. And it highlights how sweet and gentle he is. Can’t remember anyone’s name, but truly wants the best for all of them.

So, yeah, he gets murdered. Right as he was being dressed for his own consecration ceremony. In Constantinople…which, by complete chance, is where Lyra’s journey has a stopover. She’s in the live audience when the news breaks.

[Note from editing: The name of the ceremony isn’t actually that snappy. They never use the word “Pope” either, the office has a longer name. But you get what I mean.]

[Bonus note: He does get referred to as “the Saint” regularly. In our world, the Catholic Church typically doesn’t identify anyone as “a saint” until after they die. But living Saints seem to be a regular thing for the Magisterium. I’m assuming that’s a worldbuilding difference Pullman wrote in on purpose.]

As usual, I wish this was more of an active plan on Lyra’s part. She could have noticed her route East passed through the city around the big day, and planned to stop for some observation.

Meets an English teacher, Alison, who notices her lack of daemon and goes “Oh, you poor thing.” Again, Lyra doesn’t even think of her “traveling witch” cover story. (She comes up with a new one today: student on a research trip.)

They have coffee and talk about the rose-garden attacks. Lyra mentions how it’s affected Jordan College, but feels awkward revealing such personal info, because it goes against her “principles of secrecy.” As if she hasn’t been this sloppy for the whole trip already.

Alison knew someone else whose daemon disappeared, guesses Lyra is also headed for the Blue Hotel, gives convenient advice. Wish Lyra had found her by seeking her address, or trading Oakley Street code phrases, instead of just bumping into yet another plot-knowledgeable person by random luck.

And here we go with Pope Delamare. All according to keikaku.

#HisDarkMaterials