Philip Pullman Pushes The Limits Of His World In 'The Secret Commonwealth'
The latest installment in Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy finds beloved heroine Lyra grown up and troubled, at odds with her daemon Pan and in danger from the plots swirling around her.
by Jessica P. Wick
Oct 05, 2019
4 minutes
Philip Pullman's is a big novel full of big ideas, big characters and big sorrows. It is a tale of spies and philosophies and wit, of factions vying for control of the truth — or the public's opinion of the truth. It's an adventure, global in scope and epic in shape, but it's also a story about being unsettled in one's life, about living with consequences, of what happens to us when we are estranged from ourselves. I was fascinated, occasionally contemptuous as the story had me siding with one character over another, and always curious to know more about the world and what would happen and always feels like a response to the darkness in J. R. R. Tolkien's. (.)
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