The Secret Commonwealth

Where to start?? I felt like the book dragged for the first half but after sticking with it, it got much better and the action started :) I truly did not like Lyra or Pan at the start of the book (which is saying a lot because I love them in “His Dark Materials”). However, Lyra started growing on me in the second half and is coming back to the character I loved in the first triology. I'm a little upset it ended on a cliffhanger even though I know a 3rd book is coming out. Overall, a solid story with great character development and great action.

I liked the Golden Compass trilogy a lot when I was younger and still have a hilarious, highly-rated review of the audiobook on iTunes. Pullman is of course still wildly anti-institutional, really hates the idea of theocracies, and has likely intended the whole series as an insult to the Catholic Church / Church of England. But after taking a religious history class on the Reformation era in grad school I re-read the trilogy and was very glad to see that Pullman has certainly done his homework and read extensively. He quotes LOTS of Milton, has given a lot of thought to the deeper claims of Genesis about human anthropology, and has a fascinating alternative history imagining John Calvin's papacy. We disagree a lot, but his level of thoughtfulness is a welcome distinction from some of the other garden-variety atheists popular today - cough cough Dawkins.

Some new levels of grayness really help complexify the world as well, like a character who's a righteous priest, and Lyra's new philosophies. She's been swept up in a reductionist cynicism about the world (what might be called an ultra-materialism), and she's miserably unhappy. What a brave new development, for a few reasons. First, it takes a big swing at some of the New Atheist crowd who would otherwise be very much in Pullman's camp. Pullman is such a brilliant storyteller that he sees the universe as being alive with meaning and imagination and story; he rejects boring literalism. So I really like his metaphysics even though it doesn't come from a Christian perspective.
Second, it's always tricky for writers to do a sequel series to a YA-style protagonist and figure out how to make them still a compelling character. (Harry Potter is a good example of perhaps stumbling in this in the Cursed Child, while Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead do a great job). This captures a bit of the quarter-life crisis / mid-youth crisis more appropriate for a college-age person trying to figure out their adult perspectives about the world, and sometimes that period includes some deep unhappiness. You don't always expect to see that in this genre, and I really appreciated it.

Along the way he takes a few swings at tangential topics like moral relativism and lots of postmodernism (more power to him), as well as some Trump-ey ideas like alternative facts, and even gets in the refugee crisis. And the book's universe is still very fun and creative, exploring a part of the world I don't know very much about (Turkey and the upper Middle East). Along with the Belle Sauvage, I've really enjoyed what he's done with the Golden Compass world, and that's more than I can say for a lot of the expanded content in most YA worlds. Good for him.