The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)

by Philip Pullman

Lyra bent over the open vessel and found the concentrated fragrance of every rose that had ever bloomed: a sweetness and power so profound that it moved beyond sweetness altogether and out of the other side of its own complexity into a realm of clear and simple purity and beauty. It was like the smell of sunlight itself.

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,

The Hyperchorasmians, by a German philosopher called Gottfried Brande, was a novel that was having an extraordinary vogue among clever young people all over Europe and beyond. It was a publishing phenomenon: nine hundred pages long, with an unpronounceable title (at least until Lyra had learnt to pronounce the ch as a k), an uncompromising sternness of style, and nothing that could remotely pass for a love interest, it had sold in the millions and influenced the thinking of an entire generation.

It told the story of a young man who set out to kill God, and succeeded. But the unusual thing about it, the quality that had set it apart from anything else Lyra had ever read, was that in the world Brande described, human beings had no dæmons. They were totally alone.

Of figurative language, of metaphor or simile, there was not a trace. At the end of the novel, as the hero looked out from the mountains at a sunrise, which in the hands of another writer might have represented the dawn of a new age of enlightenment, free of superstition and darkness, the narrator turned away from commonplace symbolism of that kind with scorn. The final sentence read, “It was nothing more than what it was.”

Even his quest to find God and kill him was expressed in terms of the fiercest rationality: it was irrational that such a being should exist, and rational to do away with him.

“You didn’t see that chapter in The Constant Deceiver?” “What chapter?” “The one I had to suffer you reading through last week. Evidently you didn’t take it in, though I had to. The one where he pretends that dæmons are merely—what is it?—psychological projections with no independent reality. That one.

Lyra and Pan

“But you haven’t got any independent reality. You know that. If I died—” “Neither have you, you stupid cow. If I died, so would you. Touché.”

Savage Pan

“It’s contemptible.” “What is? Philosophy?” “If philosophy says I don’t exist, then yes, philosophy is contemptible. I do exist. All of us, we dæmons, and other things too—other entities, your philosophers would say—we exist. Trying to believe nonsense will kill us.”

her heart sank at the thought of losing this most precious thing, this instrument that had helped her find her way into and out of the world of the dead, that had told her the truth about Will (“He is a murderer”) in the only way that would have let her trust him, that had saved their lives and restored the bear king’s armor and done a hundred other extraordinary things.

“He was a complicated man, in a complicated situation,” said Hannah. “He seems to have been a spy, but an independent one, like an independent scholar. He was originally an experimental theologian, a physicist, and entirely on his own, he’d penetrated to the heart of the Magisterium’s Geneva headquarters and discovered all kinds of things—an extraordinary amount of material. It was in the rucksack that Malcolm rescued—” “Stole,” he said.

Bonneville from The Book of Dust

a sort of renegade; he was psychotic, or obsessed, or something….He was obsessed with you, with you as a baby, for some reason.”

Bonneville in regards to Lyra from The Book of Dust

Just a little younger than Will, she thought, when the alethiometer had told her that he was a murderer. She looked at Dr. Polstead now with eyes that seemed never to have seen him before. She imagined a stocky ginger-haired boy killing an experienced secret agent, and then she saw another pattern too: the man Will had killed had been a member of the secret service of his country. Were there other correspondences and echoes waiting to be discovered?

The alethiometer could tell her, but oh, how long it would take! How quickly she would have done it once, her fingers racing her mind as she flicked the hands around the dial and stepped unhesitatingly down the rungs of linked meanings into the darkness where the truth lay!

“And there’s a city with an Arabic name…a ruined city. Inhabited by dæmons without people.”

Malcolm couldn’t have known what made tears come to Lyra’s eyes at that point, though he did notice the tears: it was her memory of the deserted Cittàgazze, all the lights blazing, empty, silent, magical, where she had first met Will. She brushed them away and said nothing.

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

“It was local folklore, really. The shamans know about those roses.” “Do they? What do they know?” “They come from—the roses, I mean—from the heart of the desert of Karamakan. So the story goes. They won’t grow anywhere else. If you put a drop of the oil in your eye, you’ll see visions, but you have to be determined, because it stings like hell. So I’m told.”

The thing about that desert is that you can’t enter it without separating from your dæmon. It’s one of those odd places—there’s another in Siberia, I believe, and I think in the Atlas Mountains as well—where dæmons find it too uncomfortable, or too painful, to go. So the roses come at a considerable cost, you see. A personal cost as well as a financial one.”

you’re killing yourself, and me, with the way you’re thinking. You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white. As if Gottfried Brande was some kind of enchanter who made you forget everything you used to love, everything mysterious, all the places where the shadows are. Can’t you see the emptiness of the worlds they describe, him and Talbot? You don’t really think the universe is as arid as that. You can’t. You’re under a spell—you must be.”

“It was all just a childish dream. The other worlds. The subtle knife. The witches. There’s no room for them in the universe you want to believe in. How do you think the alethiometer works? I suppose the symbols have got so many meanings, you can read anything you want into them, so they don’t mean anything at all, really. As for me, I’m just a trick of the mind. The wind whistling through an empty skull. Lyra, I really think I’ve had enough.”

“The poem called Jahan and Rukhsana. It relates the adventure of two lovers who seek a garden where roses grow. When the two lovers enter the rose garden after all their trials, guided by the king of the birds, they are blessed with a number of visions that unfold like the petals of a rose and reveal truth after truth. For nearly a thousand years, this poem has been revered in those regions of Central Asia.”

“Young people don’t believe in the secret commonwealth,” Brabandt said. “It’s all chemistry and measuring things, as far as they’re concerned. They got an explanation for everything, and they’re all wrong.” “What’s the secret commonwealth?” “The world of the fairies, and the ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.”

one day there was a traveler—he might have been a gyptian man—who went there exploring, and he come back with a strange tale, how the place was haunted all right, but not by ghosts: by dæmons. Maybe the dæmons of dead people go there, maybe that’s it. I dunno why they call it the Blue Hotel. Must be a reason, though.”

“That heron,” Lyra said shakily. “The marsh lights were chasing it. They made it fly up into the engine. They knew what they were doing.” And so did I, she thought. I made it happen.

"Lyra you could never be gyptian. You're fire and have witch-oil in your blood." --- Ma Costa

The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”

The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.”

Instead, we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.”

Hmmm.....🤔

“That’s almost all gold. The rest…No, I don’t believe it.” “It is,” said his canary dæmon from his wrist. “I can tell now. It’s titanium.” “Aye. I thought so too. But that’s impossible,” Gwyn said. “They never discovered titanium till about two hundred years ago, and I never heard of a gold alloy of it.”

The alethiometer -------- The three hands that Lyra could move with the wheels were made of some black metal. The needle that moved by itself was a lighter color, a sort of stormy gray. She and Will had noticed its resemblance to the color of the blade of the subtle knife, but they had found out nothing about that; even Iorek Byrnison, who reforged the blade when it shattered, had to admit that he had no idea what it was.

“You know,” Gwyn told her, “there’s a piece of metal in the museum at the Coleg Mwyngloddiaeth that looks like part of a blade, a knife blade, something like that. No one’s ever discovered what metal it’s made of.” “It’s kind of a secret, see,” said Dafydd. “But it looks exactly like that needle.

The subtle knife and the alethiometer..... Made of the same thing? They're linked 🤔

Lyra said, “How do you know about me?” “In the world of the spirits your name is famous.” “What is this world of the spirits? It is nothing I know about. I don’t know what spirit is.” “Spirit is what matter does.” That disconcerted her. She didn’t know how to respond, and then Kubiček said, “It is your secret commonwealth, perhaps.”

Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure….

Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been—was now—the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.

The moon was climbing the sky, and the vast sweep of the Milky Way stretched above, every one of those minute specks a sun in its own system, lighting and warming planets, maybe, and life, maybe, and some kind of wondering being, maybe, looking out at the little star that was her sun, and at this world, and at Lyra.

There are three characters in this novel whose names are those of real people whose friends wanted to remember them in a work of fiction. One is Bud Schlesinger, whom we saw first in La Belle Sauvage; the second is Alison Wetherfield, whom we shall see again in the final book; and the third is Nur Huda el-Wahabi, who was one of the victims of the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower. I’m privileged to be able to help commemorate them.

Philip Pullman - Acknowledgments