I will say that I went into the book with very low expectations. I did not enjoy The Secret Commonwealth at all and this coloured my attitude to this book from page one. I went in expecting it to be bad, and maybe that prejudiced me from the start.

I will also say that I have a lot of respect and affection for Philip Pullman. HDM remains my favourite work of fiction, and this trilogy does not alter that.

With that said, I have no idea what he was trying to do with this book or this trilogy. This is one of the worst published books I’ve ever made it to the end of. It is terrible.

An immediate problem is how stupid the premise of the overall story is. The reason Lyra is on this journey is… Pan decided to go and ‘look for her imagination’ and so Lyra followed him. A completely self-inflicted problem that at no point do you ever find yourself caring about. The wooden ‘debates’ about the nature of imagination do not seem nearly as deep as I think we are supposed to find them, and as a springboard for the entire plot it’s useless. None of this needed to happen.

Then there’s the windows, which are suddenly re-introduced in this book. The whole point of the ending of Amber Spyglass was that Lyra and Will had to make the sacrifice of separation because the windows had to be closed. It was made very clear that leaving even one window open other than the one in the world of the dead (say, linking their Oxfords) would have apocalyptic consequences for all conscious life. The angels said they would close them all, and that was why they had to be separated. But in this book Lyra and Pan learn that actually there’s a bunch of windows still open all over the place, and they have no reaction to this news at all other than ‘oh yeah we know what those are’. No reflection on the news that their sacrifice was needless, or curiosity about why the windows weren’t closed (or about which worlds might still be accessible…). This should be devastating, maddening, infuriating news - but neither Pan nor Lyra seem to really care or reflect on this?

Plot threads are constantly introduced that go nowhere and are never really resolved - and which are uninteresting to begin with. At one point there is a detour to battle a ‘sorcerer’ in a cave (because Malcolm had heard of him in a poem?), and there is a line that I found unintentionally funny: “Lyra didn’t ask why they had to defeat the sorcerer, though she badly wanted to know.” Me too Lyra.

And this is not to mention the endless, dreary, one-chapter characters who are introduced in a chapter to carry out some cursory function, and then never mentioned again. Did we really need, with 10% of the book left, to be introduced to 'Tamar Sharadze' and have a whole little section on how she took over the management of Mustafa Bey’s financial affairs? Do we ever really find out why an angel randomly appears to Lyra on a boat in order to have a pseudo-intellectual conversation about the imagination?

For that matter, did anything ever come of the plot line in Brytain? It feels like PP had introduced Alice and Hannah etc. in previous books, but couldn’t really figure out what to do with them, so he just moved them around between Oxford and London to no real end, and then forgot to write any real conclusion - presumably he was as bored of writing that subplot as I was of reading it.

And inevitably, there’s the Malcolm/Lyra pairing. I feel like PP wanted to have a different ending here, and buckled under the pressure of the comments on the second book, so aborted it. Though not without the occasional sulky protests clumsily inserted into people’s dialogue about how it would be fine, really - such as the witch saying Lyra was older than Malcolm. I don’t have an issue with age gap relationships, and this gap here isn’t even that large. The reason the Lyra/Malcolm thing is so tedious nevertheless though is (1) he did know her when she was a baby, so that is kind of weird, (2) Malcolm feels a lot like a crude author stand-in (suave super-spy who’s good at everything and has the same eye spangle thing as PP) so it is kind of weird that he has this stand-in for himself fall in love with his former child protagonist, but (3) and most importantly, there is zero relationship development or any real reason for them to develop feelings for one another, other than ‘the plot requires it’. They spend almost no time together before the Caspian Sea. It is very, very forced.

Then there’s the ending. For two books now we’ve been moving towards the ‘Red Building’ and in this book we learn there’s a window to another world in there. As this story staggered towards its conclusion, I was left with the sense that while the journey to the end had been a tedious slog, maybe PP would do something cool and interesting with the ending and what they find in the Red Building. But no. They go into the other world, and it’s another desperately heavy-handed allegory about how companies are evil because they don’t follow proper planning permission laws. That’s it. I think I actually laughed out loud when I realised that this is genuinely what this entire trilogy has been building towards. What on earth was the point of any of this? Was this really why the trilogy was written?

I haven’t been reading reviews here as I only finished the book today and wanted to avoid spoilers, so I have no idea how this book has been received generally. But I cannot imagine anything positive anyone could ever get from this book. This is (presumably) the last time we will ever visit this world, and to be honest, that’s probably for the best.

Reading

Books

Paris 1919

Paris 1919

Audiobooks

Deterring Armageddon

Deterring Armageddon

Paris 1919

The Stand

Growth

The Silk Roads

One Day

Thinking in Bets

The Airlift

Great Expectations

The Doors of Perception

Empire of the Seas

The Rose Field

Follow the Money

Ernest Bevin

The Haunting of Hill House

Working in Public

Dominion

Recursion

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Devil-Land

11.22.63

I Am a Strange Loop

Sex and Punishment

The Gone World

The Technological Republic

The Holy Roman Empire

Foundation

Boom

Russia: Revolution and Civil War

The Great Gatsby

Men Who Hate Women

The Union

Four Past Midnight

The Emperor of all Maladies

Too Important for the Generals

The Man in the High Castle

Calling Bullshit

The Jacobites

White Nights

Tenants

Millennium

Speed Of Dark

A Devil's Chaplain

Deterring Armageddon

When Breath Becomes Air

The Order of Time

The World Crisis: 1915

The Idea of the Brain

The Stranger in the Woods

Between the Waves

Don't Talk About Politics

Future Boy

Crimea

Six Minutes to Winter

The Anxious Generation

The Battle for Moscow

Oxygen

Careless People

Operation Typhoon

Stolen Focus

Everything is Tuberculosis

Medieval Horizons

Original Sin

That Will Never Work

Victory '45

Your Life is Manufactured

On Democracies and Death Cults

Endgame 1944

On Leadership

How To Be Miserable

The Weimar Years

Money

The River of Consciousness

The Great Democracies