Too Much of a Good Thing?

It's been a good time for fans of Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials. A good television adaptation has wrapped its first season on HBO, and a new trilogy in the same universe, The Book of Dust, is underway. The first in that series, a prequel called La Belle Sauvage, was a welcome return to the universe. But now the second book, a sequel to the original trilogy titled The Secret Commonwealth, has come along... and has turned out to be the longest slog of a read I've had in quite some time.

This novel is set several years after the events of the original trilogy, picking up on its protagonist Lyra as a young adult. Her relationship with her daemon, her animal companion and manifestation of her own "soul," has grown strained, even combative. This in turn leads to a whole new adventure. Caught up in events is Malcolm Polstead, the college professor who, as a boy, once protected a newborn Lyra.

It's worth stressing first that I find Pullman's craft, his way of stitching words together into evocative sentences, as polished as ever in this latest book. It's not so precious to read as poetry, but it never settles for just telling the story; it's clever and insightful prose.

It's the narrative itself that turned me off this time, an anchor dragging on that precise language. The first quarter of the book was a breeze, revisiting characters from the original His Dark Materials trilogy. Seeing how time has affected them, and watching a new adventure begin to unfold, was great fun, and quite a page turner. But once the characters take to the road in earnest, the pace of the story began to slow considerably.

I found the bulk of The Secret Commonwealth to be painfully long-winded and repetitive. Emotionally, each chapter continued to hammer the same points over and over, characters expressing the same regrets in almost exactly the same way, again and again. The story then becomes episodic, like stand-alone installments of an otherwise serialized television series that's clumsily marking time until the cliffhanger season finale. For hundreds of pages on end, no one really seems to get any closer to much of anything -- not their intended physical destination, not to any moment of emotional development, not to any signpost that suggests any end in sight. The novel simply continues to fill pages.

It got to point where I really had to keep fixed in my mind how much I enjoyed the previous books in this world, and even the first chunk of this one, because I found myself feeling a growing contempt that I'd been reading and reading and reading and still didn't feel like I was ever going to get to the end. Finally, I did: an unresolved scenario meant to tee up a third and final book in the series. As of this moment? I'm not sure I want to read it. But I still feel very keenly the disillusionment of how meandering this book felt to its more taut predecessors. In presumably a couple of years, after I've had more distance, and a second season of the television series to perhaps restore some goodwill? Maybe I'll feel differently.

For now, though, I'd have to say that The Secret Commonwealth was a C- for me at best. It's a good thing this isn't the first book of either trilogy, or they'd be quite a hard sell on potential new fans.