Girls Gone Canon Cast - Joining Worlds - A Dustcussion on The Secret Commonwealth Ft. Her Dark Materials & The Dark Materials Podcast

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

While Eliana is away, Chloe gets to play - Chloe is joined by Faye from Her Dark Materials and Iain and Amy from the Dark Material Podcast to dustcuss their general reactions to The Secret Commonwealth, and to dustcuss where the heck Philip Pullman is taking the story.  This episode will be posted for public while Eliana is gone, and we couldn't be more grateful for you all letting us bridge the "gap" between worlds in the meantime. This will allow no "off" week for GGC. -------------------------------------- Her Dark Materials Website:  https://anchor.fm/her-dark-materials Her Dark Materials Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/hdmpod The Dark Material Podcast Website:   darkmaterialpodcast.com The Dark Material Podcast Patreon:   https://www.patreon.com/darkmaterialpodcast Eliana's twitter: https://twitter.com/arhythmetric Eliana's reddit account: https://www.reddit.com/user/glass_table_girl Eliana's blog: https://themanyfacedblog.wordpress.com/ Chloe's twitter: https://twitter.com/liesandarbor Chloe's blog: www.liesandarborgold.com

Hello and welcome to Girls Gone Canon, featuring Her Dark Materials and the Dark Materials podcast covering the secret commonwealth. I am your only host, I guess, today. It's very naked to say. Chloe, you know me. You guys know me. Liza Narber on Twitter, Tumblr, LizaNarberGold.com. And I am joined today by some wonderful people.

I have Faye from Her Dark Materials. You guys might know Her Dark Materials from some of their coverage of Northern Lights. They are a bi-weekly chapter-by-chapter podcast hosted by Rachel and Faye. And they have recently covered chapter eight of Northern Lights, Frustration, and had an excellent interview with Lauren Balfe,

the brilliant guy that makes us all go do-do, do-do-do, for the past, you know, few months. So we're really excited to have Faye on. We're sad Rachel couldn't join, however Rachel is pulling an Eliana and has not quite gotten through yet. No shame there. Hi! Well please, uh, Faye, tell us some more about Her Dark Materials and what you guys are working on. I know you newly have a Patreon. I'm seeing a lot of good content coming from you guys so far this year. Yeah, thank you for the intro. I mean, I think you covered quite a lot.

So thank you so much. Yeah, so yeah, we're here, Dark Materials. We're still quite new. We only started in October, but as you mentioned, we're on chapter A of Northern Lights at the minute. We are a chapter by chapter read-along and we're spoiler spoiler free so for all you guys who haven't read the books don't you worry we're with you um we look at the um the books from more of a feminist lens being too

feminist ourselves um so you'll normally hear you know a bit of shouting when there's a bit of the patriarchy coming through um but yes we have um some stuff coming up um we've got a couple of uh book club episodes which we're going to start soon where we're interviewing like a couple of our friends about um the books in general so keep an eye out for those and as you mentioned we've just started a patreon in the last couple of months so that is patreon.com forward slash hdmpod and there's lots of stuff up on there so Rach who you mentioned sadly can't join us she's an excellent artist and she um she did our logo and she draws episode art for us every week so that's available and then we've got a couple of Q&A videos and some bloopers and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, feel free to come along and join us on that journey. That's so great. Eliana is the big artist for us. I do all of our

album art for the actual episodes that come out, but she does glorious pieces, a bunch of our patrons, which if you are getting this right now, first release of this will be happening for patrons by end of February. So I'm glad you guys are listening. Thank you so much for pledging. But we are releasing this to the public on March 6. So also thank you for socializing your Girls Gone Canon experience and sharing it with everybody. I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say. But we have tons of art. So it's really exciting. Please check out that Patreon and see that art because you guys have some awesome branding. I love your little logo. Rach is the expert behind all that stuff.ach kind of sends me stuff and she's like faye do you like this and immediately i'm like yep wouldn't change a thing it's perfect but yeah

one of our patreon levels actually is that um if you pledge at a certain level rach will draw you and your demon in the style of the pod logo so that's that's a lot of fun and i kind of just watch her do it because i have no input whatsoever you're the moral support yeah that's good though that's good you need the moral support uh we're going to talk a lot about the moral support today right in the secret commonwealth and the lack of it i mean just saying oh man i feel it already. The battle dome is going to happen. The Thunderdome, step on in.

No, they're both idiots right now. Well, thank you again, Faye, for joining us. And we will definitely link everything below in the description of the episode. So if you want to check them out, you can click ahead. And we also are being joined by Ian and Amy from the Dark Materials podcast, who just put out, actually I think just yesterday, Chapter 14 of Northern Lights, Bollwanger Lights. And they have a few bonus episodes on the HBO BBC production and also have a great pre-Commonwealth episode where Amy has a glorious display of a whole new world and they berate people in power on climate change. We stan Amy and Ian. Hello. Thank you guys for joining us as well. It's like a full house. of a whole new world and they berate people in power on climate change we stand amy and ian hello

thank you guys for joining us as well it's like a full house we usually uh usually it's just by our lonesome so this is good thanks for having us hello i was trying really hard not to giggle through all of your intros there because that was hysterical yeah thank you for having us we're so excited um yes so as as again you gave an excellent intro so we don't have much to add but basically we are also um a chapter by chapter read through podcast of uh his dark materials so at the moment we're just finishing part two of northern lights or the golden compass which is exciting i'm so glad we can maybe come on to some of that but oh i need a bit more action.

And the chapters we've just got through are slightly slower, but we're getting there. We're getting back to Yorick and the gang. So yeah, very excited. We are. We are. You mentioned our bonus episode on predictions about the secret Commonwealth,

which is kind of entertaining to listen back to now because we weren't entirely wrong. Nor were we entirely right but there's some quite outlandish predictions about what we thought was going to happen in this book. So yeah we also have a Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash Dark Material Podcast Dark Material Podcast

Good. Yes. You guys did it. You got this. That was a joint effort. I always forget if it's dirt or not anyway um and we've actually been doing a bit

on there about our extra reading list um so for instance what are the books we've read that remind us

of this Histarch Materials world or were inspired or inspirations for that world um I'm interested to know

actually if you other guys have um have anything else that you've read that you think reminds you of pullman's works uh so i know um you have the podcast about the works of georgia martin i don't know if that's something that influences or uh dovetails there a lot once you've read any of the his dark materials books or the books of dust it's really hard not to relate them and And our second Subtle Knife episode is coming out covering chapters three and four. I think it's going to be out by the time this is up. Actually, I'm not sure. Eliana's in charge of that. She's a wild card, that Eliana. We just don't know. Is she ever going to come back? No one knows.

come back no one knows fey batter up uh but i do i do uh see a lot of a lot of the mythos i mean i i just went and saw a portrait of a lady on fire actually this week have any of you seen it no i haven't no no it's so good so good i highly recommend it i didn't even know i would love it it's about these two women who fall in love and it's just gorgeous and about paintings and uh a household buying feel for sure but they talk about it's just gorgeous and about paintings and a household buying feel for sure but they talk about it's anchored the framework is anchored in orpheus and the story of orpheus and uricides and the whole time i got halfway through and of course i'm a ball bag i was sobbing at the theater i'm the worst uh and i'm just like sitting there quietly sobbing during this whole movie for about two hours it was just so beautiful but they went through the story and

talked about some stuff that i want to bring up later but there's a lot of that mythos that really engrange even just the easy tragedy that is so so strong in this and i'm seeing it everywhere i look whether it's actual influences by him um in influences in general like chita gaze's uh architecture and being based off of Antonio Centella. I totally missed that until this reread of Subtle Knife where we're sitting here going, oh, Angelica asks her in the Subtle Knife, you know, do you go to Centella or are you from Chittagaze? And I'm like, oh, duh, it's a Centella reference. That's the whole point of this whole city and its futurism.

How did I miss that? So I'm seeing a lot more of that but i have been reading things like we do i just read dune for example and i saw some stuff where i'm like interesting interesting uh some philosophical stuff so i think there's a lot what have you guys been reading that are similar um we read a really scary uh ghost story over christmas that's set on svalbard um which is like very very tangentially similar but it was yeah that was like very powerful i think um and there's also quite an interesting book called um wakenhurst or wakenhurst yeah um by michelle paver which is

about a murder at the beginning of the 19th, sorry, at the beginning of the 20th century in East Anglia, right on the edge of the Fens. And it has so much stuff that is referred to in his dark materials, purely incidentally, because it's from the same cultural background. But I guess a lot of it is folkloric traditions. And that was just really interesting. Yeah. I think it's one of the things like Faye, your introduction to your podcast having a kind of feminist spin, I think ours is probably

well at the moment it's mostly historical and maybe mythological we try and pull in references and extra reading on some of the stuff that's I don't know, let's say twists on the real world that Pullman brings into his and we're yet to get there but science is another one that's, I don't know, let's say twists on the real world that Pullman brings into his. And we're yet to get there, but science is another one that I'm really keen to weave in. So as we get more into the Amber Spyglass in particular and the evolutionary biology, that's maybe a spin

that the Dark Material podcast tries to take on these books. We go down many a tangent and a side far. Yeah. So some of these other references like wackenhurst we try and build in as kind of a how do we bring out the richness that pullman puts into his worlds and help other people or listeners explore that yeah speaking of tangents we somehow managed to add one into our introduction so sorry about that but on brand no that's perfect it's very on brand we do the same don't don't feel bad sometimes we include the time we're like if you really want to skip it though we think it's important we do i do want to say i i've been doing i think that's the thing about this right like we

do a lot of research i feel like a lot of the his dark materials podcasts we all have to do quite a bit of research we can observe but there's just some stuff uh no matter what culture or background you're from reading these books that you can take from it right like new research new things Pullman's really packed so much into here whether it's folklore I can't I can't count the number of books now that I've read on folklore just because of this you know Amy you asked the question of what kind of books do um you think are quite similar and for me I always hark back to the Harry Potter books um I read them at a very similar well obviously I didn't read the um the His Dark Materials books until last year but

obviously they kind of came out around the same time um and I was a massive Harry Potter fan so whenever Rach and I are talking about His Dark Materials I always find a way to like link it back to Harry Potter we have a thing on our podcast where we like play a drinking game with the listeners and whenever i mention harry potter you've got a drink because i will mention it i was just gonna say they have like um the parallels like orphaned child like with a prophecy and they definitely do um relate i think but also i kind of wish that i'd read his dark materials as a child because i would i would have much preferred as much as I love Harry Potter I would have much preferred for their protagonist to be a girl um so it's nice to read His Dark Materials and have Lyra um so I kind

of I always feel a bit sad that I didn't have that one when they first came out when I was young yeah there's a character in A Song of Ice and fire that has a lot of that little girl fiery quality of the lyra it's aria stark and that's one constantly i'll see a few parallels here and there of her uh but it's interesting following that children as a hero's journey a song of ice and fire has a bunch of kids hero journey kind of stories going on and i see that a lot and harry potter has that too obviously and even in the secret Commonwealth, you get a lot of that bittersweet of the last Harry Potter book, right? Of Harry's not returning to Hogwarts. Lyra can't stay in Jordan anymore.

It's that feeling of the hero never being able to return home. It's that feeling of growing up in adulthood. And I know Pullman obviously has said, well, you know, it's not really youth fiction. It's just that's what the publishers told me to call it. That's what would sell. Because it really isn't it's dark uh this book especially the secret commonwealth gets you feeling pretty dark it's adulthood right like this is the specters from the subtle knife only turned up 10 times empty shell-less depressed you know the normal stuff absolutely one of the other books but i know pullman has talked about the lord of the rings

trilogy um in quite damning terms i think he basically says it's uh full of a world and no characters that's me making that up it's not quite but that basically seems to be his his summary that none of the characters in all of the rings have any emotional depth or um it's hard to have any empathy because they never show any emotion but lord of the rings is uh for me quite similar it's this huge expansive world with a bunch of historical backdrops that you sense is there but obviously pullman doesn't really explore in any great depth it's more like a backdrop um so yeah obviously very popular series but i think lord of the rings is similar ish even though pullman's not particularly uh yeah full of praise for it.

Yeah, I mean, there's no way you finish the Amber Spyglass without tears in your eyes for the last five chapters, right? Yeah, absolutely not. There's not a dry eye in that room. We can't lie about that one here. Everybody has had the same experience, so it's not really like it should be shameful. We've all cried to the Amber Spyglass. And he puts the heart into it.

And while there are a lot of decisions maybe i don't agree with that we're going to talk about uh he does seem to have a way to find that heart and absolutely this is very much his burning of the shire for lyra right this is uh what we're going to talk about today is that i suppose just with more heart but before we get over there you guys i want to have a quick chat about a question we got before we go into our initial thoughts about the secret Commonwealth from one of our followers, TFCNU on Twitter, who asked, Why does there seem to be destiny when Lyra was supposed to have ended destiny in the Amber Spyglass? Is Pullman retconning the witch's prophecy to apply to the new trilogy instead? Paul Lyra, right?

the witch's prophecy to apply to the new trilogy instead poor lyra right like she went through like an entire like horrendous journey when she was 12 and now she's going through another one and it's like oh can't that kid just be done and enjoy her life and like this this might be me um because i finished uh reading the secret commonwealth literally the day before we were recording this um and i have i don't have a great memory um but for me it became clear that there's another prophecy for lyra right at the end of the secret commonwealth and it kind of felt to me i don't know i feel like it's not made clear in the in especially the bell sauvage or the beginning of the secret commonwealth and i was just a bit like does she need to have another one like it doesn't need to be a destiny like it can just be a story without it being a prophecy i mean i don't know what you guys think

about that that might be just me being very negative yeah that's that's such a really good point I haven't this is an excellent question by the way as well um I haven't I haven't really thought about it that much but yeah I think you might be right Faye in that it doesn't really feel like it's very consistent with with what we would have thought to um know at the end of Amber Spyglass but also there don't seem to have been any repercussions in terms of what happened at the end of the third book of the previous trilogy nothing seems to have changed really

and that's the thing that I find kind of disconcerting so maybe it is that kind of similar to when we thought that Lyra sort of taking Roger to Lord Asriel was the betrayal. And then it was like, oh no, it's actually Lyra leaving Pan in the world of the dead,

that there was a big betrayal. I wonder if it's that kind of thing when we think it's her fulfilling her destiny sooner and actually it's still to come. So that's a really good idea, actually. Could also just be that there never was an end of destiny and that, I don't know, we talked about this in one of our early episodes, can't remember when now, but how deterministic is Pullman's universe? And I guess if the people who got the prophecy that Lyra was going to end destiny were simply wrong, well then, sure, there could be others and there could be others to follow. If it's a deterministic universe, it's a deterministic universe. I don't know how you could get out of that that makes sense if she was predetermined to do something why would she not then be predetermined to do something after it um

don't know that's me being like oh overly logical hey i'll bring some spock but yeah like if she yeah if she was always going to end destiny in the first book well then she was presumably predetermined to do something else. So really she couldn't end Destiny because the universe Pullman's built is kind of mechanical and deterministic in the sense that, yeah, there can be a prophecy. There have to be further prophecies. Don't know, that feels like first year university philosophy that someone will, I'm sure, tweet about and prove how I'm wrong. But yeah, I don't't know that's my thought well there's so much at play that feels like it's against that right like pullman literally has written this series of novels about free will right but he's also saying this is prophesized this is going to happen so maybe it could be a play on prophecy uh if heliana were here i'm sure

she would have a speech there's a certain prophecy in a song of ice and fire that you know feels unnecessary when you get to the core of this character this character does themselves in via tragedy like way on their own you didn't even need a prophecy for them to do so so sometimes prophecies feel as a plot device very much that a plot device you look at harry Harry Potter being born the same day as Neville Longbottom, so it could have been about either of them. It's all about interpretation for prophecy. But also, if Pullman's preaching these novels about the fight and the war on free will, and wouldn't that really not equate a destiny?

Like, wouldn't it mean that whatever Lyra does, whether she saves the universe one more time, does it have to be a prophecy thing it feels like the retcon is a little more likely than this this book kind of felt like a handful of retcons and maybe it's pullman exercising his gavel being like i'm the author and you can't death of the author me and this is what i say like haha lyra and will kiss haha that's what it was like this is what i say like haha lyra and will kiss haha that's what it was like this is what i you know like i want to clarify some things since i didn't do it 15 years ago i don't know i guess just like put it on the table pull them yeah yeah pretty good question

yeah now now i'm thinking about it one one other thing this is super speculative is um when seraphina peckler brings up that lyra will end destiny itself she says if she fails then everyone will be almost acting like automata and will be more or less like it will be in this mechanical world that's full of logic and rationale and there won't be any kind of like spark in the world anymore and one

of the things I, because I was re-reading the book a bit via audiobook but I haven't finished it so my memory of the last parts of the Supercommonwealth vague. But one of the things I remember that Lyra says several times is that she feels like she's acting automatically. And you think about the books, which we're going to talk about them in a bit, but the books that Lyra is reading that Pan is so upset about her reading, they come off with, what's that line? The logic that everything was what it was. And it's very logical and Pan's very mad about how logical and how Libra's lost her imagination.

And he's off to get her imagination. I mean, that stifles dust, right? Yes. Maybe that's something from the stem of it. That is stifling dust. I mean, it's very obvious we have a problem with that. Hence the rose water we're going to launch into. So who knows?

Good questions. Well, let's jump into our initial thoughts now that we've already given half of them. I want to hear, Faye, Amy, Ian, what you guys thought the first time you read it. Were you just like, whoa, what? Yeah, it was a lot. I'm quite an avid reader and I'm never put off by how big a book is. It excites me most of the time but I did find myself trailing off a little bit with this book especially um like at the beginning

and then into the middle parts there's so many characters and so many new characters that we have to learn about and I it's quite difficult to to do that when you're also trying to follow the main storyline of obviously Lyra and Pan um and I did find that very difficult and also I am not keen and we might want to put a content warning at the beginning of this because obviously we're going to talk about the sexual assault that happens um I'm not a big fan of that being included in the series at all. And it was in La Belle Sauvage too, but we obviously only really learned what happened properly to Mrs. Lonsdale in the secret Commonwealth. And then we have that horrible train scene,

which I know we'll get into properly later. But personally, I'm just not a fan of anything to do with sexual assault being included in a book where I don't particularly think that it's needed there could have been other ways to show that hardship on Lyra without that happening to her so I did find that very jarring and that's obviously very near the end of the book um it's not my favorite of Pullman's um I thought it was quite fragmented there are definitely I love the the plot of Lyra and Pan being separated.

I love that. It's heartbreaking, but I think it's kind of ingenious from Pullman to bring that back because we don't, we didn't really know how that affected Lyra and Pan in the original trilogy when she left him in the Land of the Dead. So I do like that. And I like seeing Lyra as a woman and Pan as like an older demon and how their relationship's grown. But I was like really. And I like seeing Lyra as a woman and Pan as like an older demon and how their relationship's grown. But I was like really hankering for them to like get back together at the end and we don't get that.

And I remember closing the book and being like, oh, we're so close, but we don't get it. And now we have to wait like years for the next book. Yeah, I hear that. It definitely feels like a second book in a trilogy, which is not usually my favourite in terms of there's a lot of stuff being introduced. And I think I'm fairly confident that it's all going to be tied up, but I don't think it's going to be tied up neatly necessarily.

I did like that there are a lot of big themes that are introduced and woven together. I don't if if they're going to be um tied up basically in in in the third installment um I think I did I did really enjoy it but I think I definitely like QFA found it quite difficult reading at times partly because um I was getting frustrated at characters that I really love and have grown to love and really like have grown to respect and want and wanted them to be doing well. And so to be having all of this stuff happening was kind of like a bit difficult for me on a on that kind of level. So just kind of like, oh, just just talk to each other, guys. I can just work this out.

So I found parts of that quite frustrating. It is quite a long book a lot of seemingly disjointed things happen but i'm still kind of confident that they're gonna go somewhere i don't know maybe i think part of what helped me feel confident about that was reading lyra's oxford uh either after or just before i read this book and seeing there's a in the back of that there's a little um brochure for the ss zenobia cruise that then has the appointment date um and meeting in the cafe and talia or whatever is um so that was written like 10 years ago so to some extent some of this has been thought about or planned or mused upon for at least that long. And therefore I have this kind of deep hope in my heart

that it will go somewhere wonderful. But I kind of need that conclusion to kind of see all of that through, if that makes sense. It's either going to be a tour de force of putting together loose ends or just like a mess of carpet at the third book. I do want to say, I will contest in a little bit with you, Amy,

and we'll talk, but I think he's been planning it since 97. Ooh. Hot take. That's exciting. But we'll talk about that later because Ian is going to tell us about some themes. Yeah, well, I don't know.

I'm kind of going to agree a little bit with both Faye and Amy. So yeah, hard to follow the three main plot lines of Pan lyra and malcolm at various points you're like ah do we really have to get off this track and go back to the other track now this feels weird and then you've got all the backdrop of delamere just kind of randomly narrator moving over to his world so it is hard to follow and i don't know how much those three storylines were all necessary perhaps in the way it was told rather than the detail or depth. I don't know I'm not sure yeah anyway we'll see it could be that all of these things are pulled together and they're all relevant and necessary but it was a harder read than the previous books for sure. I really liked the

cognitive dissonance of Pan and Lyra going separate ways in a sense. I think that's a lovely analogy for growing up and maybe going through some more existential angst. So yeah, using the demon analogy for humans again, but in a much richer and more complex way, I thought was really interesting. Sense of depression and yeah, just all sorts of psychological aspects that Pullman explores in this book with Pan going a different way to Lyra which I think is really interesting so I don't know yes I I enjoyed it but it felt at times a bit random I'm sure we'll cover it at some point but the alchemist with the dude who sets on fire and then his water demon just what like I I I listened I listened to the entire thing on an audio uh And yeah, I just found I must have

drifted off for like two minutes and then came back in and thought, what is happening? What is this? What am I reading? So yeah, I don't know. I enjoyed it. And I'm hopeful, maybe less optimistic than Amy. I'm hopeful that these loose ends will be tied up together neatly. Yeah, I wouldn't say it was my favorite book. In fact, it's probably near the bottom of the pile for the Pullman series so far. I'm not saying it's bad, but it was no Amber Spyglass. Well, and after following La Belle Sauvage,

I was like, what? What? What is this? La Belle Sauvage was a banger. That was a slapper. Once I was about 70% into La Belle Sauvage, I was like, all right, this is a bookpper like i got once i was about 70 into la belle sauvage i was like all right this is a book like i'm in i was scared i was like on the edge of the bed or the seat i was tapping my foot anxiously while i read and then this happened and it was a struggle it was

a slog at first it was uh it was a little confusing and i i need to reread it like i need to just delve into it but i think because we're analyzing the subtle knife right now it definitely has the second book of the trilogy feel there's a lot in subtle knife that it's weird that there's a couple connections i'm finding because both of those books the first time i read subtle knife i read through it like water but uh not like rose water but like water but It did have some moments that were kind of like, why is this happening? So I think he has a plan. I hope he has a plan.

On the other hand, I also think he's flipping us off going, I'm doing what I want. It's my book. I had so many questions and I'm starting to make some dots from across all the books happen. But I guess another thing to think on is should we think of these separately pun intended uh separately from the main novels because there's a lot of retcon back and forth of lyra at age 18 was doing this but also lyra at oxford when she was 15 was acting like this and now she's 20 and she's like this and like do these really all count towards canon that's a question yeah a weird one isn't it it's always difficult when there's a book series that you've enjoyed and then another part of that story

is then in your world and it's difficult to think oh all these things I loved from the first books might have a different meaning now and I think that I kind of go back and forth as to whether I enjoy that or not I think sometimes I do if it's done in a clever way but I think sometimes it can feel a bit shoehorned in and that's when I'm a bit like okay yeah yeah I think I think one of the things I find jarring is potentially the style or the amount of focus as well. Because I was thinking about what you said about Harry Potter at the beginning, Faye, and those books, they get darker, but they have the same style all the way through. It's an element of detective story with some humour, but the style is kind of similar in every book. It just gets a little bit darker. The Belle Sauvage and Secret Commonwealth, it feels like he's taken a left turn at some traffic lights and gone, I'm going to explore some drug trip fantasy now. Whereas the first three books are much more, I don't know,

sequential and logical and it's more of a typical story. Whereas the last two that have come out feel, yeah, they feel more like this sort of random exploration of fantasy and myth and strange worlds and inconsistencies. It just felt very different to read, forgetting the content more stylistically. Yeah. I'm hoping.

It's like he just wanted out there. I'm hoping we can get to kind of relish that though and it will feel like i certainly think it's maybe reflecting the fact that his audience has grown up and therefore something a bit more challenging is okay um i don't know yeah i don't know we'll see we'll see we'll see in the third one yeah not closing the book i mean like i'm still here pullman i'm still listening i guess but that's only because the other series is never happening for me like you guys are all now we have to wait a few years and i'm like listen listen you guys about your waiting a

few years for a book okay i don't want to hear it there's none of that on this podcast okay i don't know i won't close the book for sure i will keep waiting but there's definitely some questions i have and i know we all have them so let's get into it and start exploring some of these plots right right so did you guys see the new star wars at all did anyone see that no no when oscar isaacs looks oscar isaacs has a moment where he looks at the camera and says, wow, the main villain, quote unquote, is bad? Question mark?

How did that happen? That's how I felt about the magisterium, because you open the book and the magisterium's still here going strong. Yes, they're still here. We have a quote from Marcus Delamere in in the books where he says it seems that she is under certain protections legal and otherwise i on your magisterium point i have seen and i'm sure you guys have too a lot of anger on social media that kind of argues that the first books now don't mean anything because the whole point was fighting for the freedom from the magisterium

and i can see what they mean i think it might be a little bit strong to say they don't mean anything but it's kind of like you spent all these three books and this a long time with these books and then to come to these ones and then learn the secret commonwealth and then learn that it didn't help it's it's it's a difficult one like for me i kind of have a bit of a love hate relationship with that because i think it's more realistic that the magisterium would still be at large yeah i think that yeah if you think about the society that we all live in we we know it's difficult to to overthrow any oppressive society like that and i think it does make

logical sense they would still be a thing but then the other part of me is like that and i think it does make logical sense they would still be a thing but then the other part of me is like oh but i wanted it to be defeated because that's what that's what happens in fiction and stories um so yeah i'm kind of like on both sides of the fence with it yeah i i completely agree with you faye i'm also completely on the fence about i want it to result be resolved but also it's not really realistic for it to be resolved, but also I want it to be resolved, damn it. So yeah, I definitely get pushed and pulled. And I suppose at the end of the end,

the spyglass, we don't really know to what extent everyone knows what has happened. So it's perfectly logical and reasonable that the Magisterium would just continue exactly as it had been, because presumably there wasn't necessarily any interaction between them and the Authority or the Angels or anything. So why would they change what they're doing? And even if they did know what had happened, then, yeah, why would they necessarily stop wanting to have lots of power? So, yeah.

Yeah. I know what you mean about that kind of ham-fisted turning to the camera and going, brr, brr, brr, the baddie is still in town. Yeah. But I love that. I'm a child still when I'm reading stuff, so anything that's kind of really corny, I'm like, yes, excellent. I like Delamere as the introduction of a character as well. I'm a child still when I'm reading stuff. So anything that's kind of really corny, I'm like, yes, excellent. Um,

I like, I like Delamere as the introduction of characters as well. You might come onto that, but, um, giving the magisterium a bit more of a single villain face. Again, it's quite ham-fisted and blunt,

but I, I quite like it. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I, I sort of just wish Pullman had maybe explored a bit more through that. So if he's going to, I don't know, draw analogies to stuff,

you could look at the death of any industry, some big tobacco or big oil or any other industries that have come under fire for doing something evil in the world, how those historically respond. You know, cause confusion, doubt, raise the question of, oh, we should hear two sides of the debate. It might have been interesting to have the magisterium maybe facing up to what happened, but basically calling it inconclusive or a lie or fake news

or some other kind of like, ha ha ha, this is like what's going on in modern times. Nudge nudge, wink wink. So I don't know, there could have been something a bit more interesting in that. Maybe I just missed it if it's in there. But yeah, I felt very much like, here's a villain. And that was kind of it. a bit more interesting in that uh maybe i just missed missed it if it's in there but um yeah i felt very much like here's a villain and that was kind of it uh so yeah i suppose the name change helps right like les messages being if he that's the thing so all of us are sitting here saying

this and it's like you know the one person who could have done something to clear this up philip pullman isn't it his job to write the book i don't know that's a little crazy that's how i feel it's like jk rowling did the same thing right like she was like here's this really cool plot about how power corrupts and how harry even though he is this orphan who has been mistreated and he has to fight against this government force and against this evil force and the government's supporting the evil guys don't you think and he it's like Pullman doesn't think that he's so close it's like you're almost there Pullman you're like her room just got ransacked by them basically but they both don't go deep enough I feel like but that's the really interesting part that

political corruption and it's not that the original war was for nothing. I guess it doesn't feel that way because war is, that's how war always feels, right? No one wins. It's awful. Everyone freaking dies. And it's horrible. It's just not good. All to fight for more freedom against oppressors. And of course, maybe the Magisterium would still be around, get new leaders, etc.

But it just does feel like, oh, so from Lyra's Oxford on, nothing bad happened. And all of a sudden, now that lyra's 20 ha ha ha as they say she's about to be 21 which means she has to take care of her own affairs now and so now she's no longer going to have those protections and i guess that's how he explains it right like that they were just biding their time but and that the rose thing comes up like ah this is what they've been doing in the background while they bide their time to get Lyra. I don't know. It just feels shoehorned after being in the prequel.

There is some stuff in the Amber Spyglass, though, about, I think it's, I should say as well, me and Amy are still reading through Northern Lights, so, man, we are going to be well out of touch for Amber Spyglass references. I think at the end there's um a discussion with zephaniah um who kind of says that lord asriel's republic will ultimately fail because you have to build it where you are you know it's all to do with you can't live in a world that you weren't

born in so i guess this kind of follows on from that to some extent and also if asriel and sort of the original mission was to kill god well what they found was that there wasn't a God to kill. It's maybe unsurprising that they return and basically there's still the hard work of just dismantling a big powerful apparatus that isn't held up by a supernatural deity. It's just human constructs. Yeah. You know, it's sort of inconsistent and consistent at the same time that the Magisterium is still powerful and a thing in Lyra's world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really great point, too. I think maybe having LaBelle being the first book made that a little disjointed, although I do love that recurring theme of the power. LaBelle's Fage was so incredibly powerful because you saw how power corrupts and how you have someone like Bonneville who went rogue right he went rogue from the whole operation he was a really respected theologian and he was a higher up everyone was like yeah that's a guy in a suit right there but he ended up like going completely corrupt and rogue and using his power personal power for bad and I feel like it just feels disconnected you know we've been separated from Lyra for so long

and now Lyra isn't even Lyra anymore right when we opened the book but something that I thought was interesting was that Marcus de la Mir said Lyra was under certain protections legal and otherwise otherwise could have obviously been uh Hannahph and everyone else keeping an eye out for her and you know the witches and all these other people but otherwise really makes me think like is it because of her quote-unquote witches blood they talk about all the time and is that quote-unquote fairy blood instead valid point um where we didn't through as you mentioned northern lights at the minute and we've just got past the the bit where Mark Oster says that she has witch's oil in her um yeah so that was like really fresh in my mind

and it's interesting that like you mentioned that it could be fairy blood as well because I suppose that ties into the bigger theme of this book right the secret commonwealth and I think the thing with the secret commonwealth is that Pullman's just kind of giving a name to a thing that we knew was already there anyway. So all these like different magical creatures and things that seem quite normal, but could actually be like magical interference. I've like pulled out a lot of those in Northern Lights, which I've said to Rach, like, do you think that this is some kind of like magical interference? Like we had a conversation where we were talking about mrs coulter and because there's i can't remember the specific uh paragraph but there's a when the first when pullman's first describing her he mentioned something about her having

uh her being very charming and that everyone is immediately attracted to it and I remember saying to Rage do you think that's some kind of magical property yes um and I think yeah now coming into the secret commonwealth and kind of seeing Lyra um figure that out or being told about it and it becoming a bit more prominent then I think that potentially there's stuff in the older books I mean I suppose it is a bit of retconning again that we could apply that lens to as well absolutely yeah and i must say when you were talking um when you and rachel were talking about that part in uh northern lights when you first meet mrs coulter i can't remember if it was which one of you made the comparison but you compared her to a vela and i honestly when i was listening to that i just stopped in

the street and applauded because i was like that is exactly what she's like she has that otherworldly power of like just beguiling everyone around her and um yeah i think it's yeah it's really interesting and i was really hoping we'd learn more, A, about the secret Commonwealth, as you say, which I think we do a little bit in this book, despite it being titled that we don't learn a huge amount. And B, a lot more about Mrs. Coulter, because she seems to be, I don't know, in my head, there's some big question mark about what her impact on Lyra is in that way, if that makes sense, because she's always felt otherworldly. And I'm not sure how much of it is just like hyperbolic language or if there is something like genuinely mystical about her and if that was somehow affecting Lyra. So, yeah, I also think one other little headcanon that I have, and it's not been proved yet in this volume, is that the world of the Secret Commonwealth relates to the spirit world that the shaman talk about at the end of the Amber Spyglass, I think. world and that being some way that they can travel between between worlds without physically changing um changing world and my particular headcanon is that that might be how we see will again in the

third volume uh that's potentially trying not to like throw things right now of excitement i know i know so the first moment where we sorry I know I'm like going on to a different point now but the first moment when we potentially

see Kir Yava in Lyra's dream in the sitcom I was like oh my god it's happening Will's worked out how to travel

into the spirit world like his dad oh my god I made all of those noises and you went ultrasonic yeah

but I don't know much about I made all of those noises. And you went ultrasonic. Yeah. But I don't know much about about fairies necessarily. So I'd be interested to hear any of your theories about how that would affect things as well. So yeah, that's something I'd like to mull on a bit

more and certainly see how that affects Lyra's story and what protections they may or may not be giving her so yeah yeah so I don't know I probably agree I would take the dumber approach of the book title by the protections of the secret commonwealth I think Delamere is kind of enough of a schmoozy betrayer that he's probably aware of some of the implications of the secret commonwealth the world of fairy and uh what's beyond um you know the tenants of the church so i think there's a hint there that lyra is under the protection of some other realm uh not just the human realm

and jordan college and um yeah the people she's surrounded by but the fairy and the fantastical as well yeah and della mehmet definitely knows more than he's letting on in several points in this book. So we don't really know how much he knows and what he really believes in. That's the weird thing, though, is that if, you know, Marisa had disappeared so long ago and how he thinks of her, we don't get much more than that one or two chapters from him, which are really interesting. But it's interesting that Pullman chose him to lead that cause. What's Marcel? I think I've been calling him Marcus

he's definitely a Marcus we didn't pick up on it no neither did I who cares what his name is jerk maybe it wasn't but I swear it was I feel like there's a reference to him elsewhere but I feel like and I guess we're talking a little bit about that secret commonwealth now because that title of the book I expected so much more uh yes the secret commonwealth and I guess we're talking a little bit about that secret commonwealth now, because that title of the book, I expected so much more, ah, yes, the secret commonwealth. And I mean, it's obviously straight taken from the secret commonwealth of folklore.

And I did read a book, Evans Wentz, W.I. Evans Wentz wrote this book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. celtic countries and i've been reading a lot of folklore since la belle sauvage because that fairy garden i feel like we can't talk about this without talking about the garden in la belle sauvage that underworld-esque garden uh where where malcolm has lyra and they have to you know go through the things basically please the water gods to get out and that area and the fairy that happens around there when the fairy gives her her milk i'm wondering if that which seems like such a small incident that happens is going to be the framework for all of this moving forward because it felt like such a weird trippy lsd dream that he put us in right with all those people in the garden party ignoring them and of course that

horror of bonneville and his his laugh haunts me, haunts me, man. But I feel like that just was out of nowhere and the fairy and them getting her back, but just barely from the fairy. And in the fairy faith in Celtic countries, basically, Evans Wentz talks about how the fae would kidnap people, especially beautiful women to take for wives. And if you eat their food, you remain trapped in another world and if you're taken by a fairy you go to the other world the land of the dead if you return from the abduction you'd recover but you would otherwise die there and eating their food is taboo because it alters the body and keeps you from returning to the land of the living so with so much of lyra's adventures in amber spyglass with freeing everyone in the land of the dead and it kind of feels like that might be what's waiting within the demon hotel or the the demon

house basically and letting them free maybe maybe she has to let the demons free in a third kind of reversal of freeing the spirits like her and pan do with the demon cages and of course amber spyglass and i wonder to your point amy if it will tie in with some of that will stuff which we will talk about I'm sure in predictions but um I think that a lot of the Pan and Lyra separating stuff really indicates the trauma that she went through and she's never gotten over it and she's been holding on to will and all these people and having that fairy protection and maybe tapping into some of this secret commonwealth stuff whether it's finding the deep mystique of a portal or what is going to be used to get over will yeah that's super interesting oh i'm so excited

no i'm so happy you guys are here i haven't been able to talk about this i'm so excited Don't tell Eliana Hopefully she doesn't have to listen to this Great betrayal. Prophecy Betrayal So that's my big spiel on fairy That's what I think that means. I think her fairy blood is what's happening here

I think that's what's been so special about her this whole time I guess to him that maybe this whole blessed as a baby thing is what's been protecting her and what's been so special about her this whole time i guess to him that maybe this whole blessed as a baby thing is what's been protecting her and what's made her so important to the witches uh maybe maybe the prophecy is already there but doesn't need to necessarily be a prophecy she's just important and has to change stuff yeah i agree with you on that i think that i completely agree on the fact that that part of la belle sauvage is so trippy i think i was reading it in bed and i was like falling asleep and i got to that bit and i was

like what what is happening yeah no one talks about it right like i feel like no one has said anything about it since this book came out and i'm like is anyone are we going to talk about the garden is anyone going to talk about it did it happen did i dream it that's exactly what i meant um at the beginning of Change of Style. You get to the Velsa Verge and it's kind of normal, normal, normal, normal. Oh, Grandfather Thames. What? And then you're like, okay, well, I guess that book finished. And then Secret Commonwealth, you're like, okay, normal, normal, normal.

Boom, it's just the same thing again. Yeah, it's a very strange change of style from porn. But I think you're right that the fairy is clearly very important. I just agree with basically everything you've just said. I think that is protection. Antibodies through the fairy milk. Absolutely. There's the science.

You guys get it. It's ambaric you know interestingly enough like if that is what it is i wonder with kind of that the commonwealth in general you know speaking of the british commonwealth and immigration uh maybe lyra is going to lead all of the secret commonwealth and all of these different people of different cultures to be more integrated into society as a normal thing maybe it's a more free world for those people to exist instead of having to exist on their hovels and their sand islands and stuff i don't know interesting thought so she certainly seems to impact them um in an interesting way in the

fence with georgio but yeah so maybe she is gonna do something there well i think we all have to talk about the most depressing i don't want to i don't want to i know it hurts so much you guys uh pan and lyra oh yeah it's just truly devastating isn't it um i was looking through the book again this morning and one of the things that really and again sorry i'm really terrible at like noting what pages and chapters things happening but a bit to what it's towards the beginning and he calls pan calls lyra a stupid cow and that really just hit me like i know that they were arguing anyway and that obviously they weren't having a good time with each other but when he said that to her i was like oh god like it just hit me right in the gut and like i was

really sad that they were split up for almost the entire book and i know that that's the point um and that's that's exactly what pullman wants and wants us to feel but I I just kept thinking back to yeah like Northern Lights and the first trilogy when they're like so close I'm I'm rereading um I think it's chapter 10 for uh Rach and I's next recording and there's a bit where um Pullman describes Lyra and Pan like cuddling and their like hearts beating as one and I was like oh god no it's too much um but yeah like I said at the top of the episode I do like it as a storyline I think it's different I think it's new I think it's it tugs on the heart string strings in the right way that makes you want to carry on reading about it because now how invested are we all now in seeing them reunited um and i think that when we get there and hopefully when we get there in the next book

hopefully we'll all be a lot happier than we are at the ending of this one fingers crossed fingers crossed yeah definitely her calling pan calling her a stupid cow was like such a good punch i completely agree um but that, like, got me almost more than that was when he said something like, get away from me, you stink of garlic. And, like, I don't know why, but that, like, really affected me. And then, like, a couple of days after I was re-listening to that recently for this recording, I was then, like, preparing some cooking

and I was putting loads of garlic in it and I was like, no, Pan, don't say it! I't say it I'm like almost broke down again and then I wander over and just go you stink Amy yeah it was really really painful to read but yeah I I really like it as a as a device and I think it's a very interesting exploration of of what's happened to Lyra and Pan because I guess I always felt like at the end of maybe this is my memory playing tricks on me but I always felt like at the end of the Amber Spyglass we don't really

see them interacting very much because it's a lot of them with Will and Kiryava not necessarily them on their own so yeah I don't know it sort of makes sense that there would be some impact on them from that horrible experience. And I think it's quite interesting to see Philip Pullman starting to explore depression in terms of his writings,

and it's something he's talked about quite a lot. And yeah, it's quite, there's a very good podcast actually on Backlisted Pod where he talks about one of his favourite books called The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a very unusual and idiosyncratic book about depression, basically. But it's, yeah, it talks about it in a very strange way, almost like dissecting it as a as a experience and talking about aspects of it so it's very interesting from that point of view and i enjoyed

reading it in terms of looking forward to what will happen but it's so so tough to get through yeah i find it interesting as well i don't this is just a comment and then i'll leave it because i haven't really thought about it much beyond this but i find it interesting in the book pan is um far more concerned with reconciling with lyra and then getting back together whereas lyra seems to be more um just driven by her mission of finding the blue hotel she seems to dwell less on repairing their damaged relationship than he does maybe i'm misremembering that because i haven't read it um that recently but i i kind of think that's interesting um and if if it is in any way a kind of exploration of mental health and depression, it's quite common, I think, for people to dive into either a job or some other distraction, you know, could be research, could be learning a new area. And that's what Lyra seems to do here we don't get a lot of well I think Pullman talks about it is show the reader don't just tell them so you know write a good book don't tell them how you've written a good book in in the book itself um and you get that with Penn and Lyra

that you don't see their relationship deteriorate you just see the fact that it's poor um and I yeah I wonder if Lyra diving into her kind of philosophy and the books that she ends up getting into that kind of pull them further further apart is a nice analogy at least for what people in a depressive state of mind can end up doing or people at least who are experiencing a degree of self-loathing you may just distract yourself and dive into your work or your studies or something else rather than addressing your mental health straight on so i don't know i think there's a lot of there's a lot of good uh things to explore in the lyra and pan relationship but yes it's heartbreaking really um certainly compared

to the first book where you know we've just gone through the bolvanger chapters and how relieved lyra is when she escapes the demon cages and how passionately they're fighting when they're about to be separated and she backs against the wall to defend, uh, him or them to her death. Yeah. Uh, and by contrast,

this is just, uh, yeah. Yeah. Sad. I would not recommending those, reading those two parts, uh,

side by side. It's not good. From a personal experience, she says. It is really sad and i think when you look at it on that meta level of pan is a part of her so this whole book is haha i see you philip pullman lyra trying to find herself yeah right and more than that she's trying to understand i think the blue hotel is totally i mean that is she thinks that the answers are there right when the answers are really inside her like her and pan have the answers it's a communication problem it's typical

relationship bullshit right but she's totally come on lyra like you need to just talk to yourself some more um but we never deal with what happens in the amber spyglass you guys made some great points there's never i mean this is the specific trauma that has come from that severing we see the nurses that have been separated in bullvanger and how that affects their personality right we see them despondent this is how it's affected lyra it wasn't forcefully by machine it was out of moment of passion and out of you know destiny and fate and doing the right thing. But it wasn't the right thing for her and Pan.

It was a sacrifice. And what they've sacrificed in their relationship, we don't see the punch in the secret commonwealth. The punch has already happened. The punch happened a long time ago, and it's time for them to finally face it and deal with it with each other. She's lost herself. Yeah. Literally. Yeah.

deal with it with each other she's lost herself yeah literally yeah yeah well ian you brought up the books that are kind of introduced in this uh the constant deceiver by simon talbot and the hypercorasmians by gottfried brand who we get to spend some time with well pronounced thank you that was like a one and done, honestly. I'm a little impressed myself. Our friend Lo Jacomir, who's written some really awesome essays and pieces about the His Dark Materials books, sent us an email and said,

what is up with the books that Lyra loves and Pan hates? When I first read Commonwealth, I felt like they represented contemporary discourse in academia and science. One only thinks rational things are valid empiricism one that nothing is real extreme post-modernism talbot's thinking is called relativism in the book and how does this connect to how talbot's thinking is connected to the magisterium spreading fake news what is pullman saying here good question yeah he wants to tackle that one i mean i was just gonna say great question i don't know if i'm best placed to answer it but what i will say is i found it very interesting that um

with their relationship between demons and humans because i think with going back and rereading northern lights and aiming the and you might feel the same but learning all that kind of like demon lore and how they interact with their humans and learning again that it's taboo for to for demons to be touched by another person and all that kind of stuff it's interesting to learn that if Lyra reads a book then Pan has to read it so Pan obviously doesn't want to read those books but he has to whether he actually sits and reads it with Lyra it's unclear but that information is now in his head as much as he he doesn't want it to be and that's like an interesting thing to me because it's not it's it's not consensual which is in their like level of consent between a human and their demon interests me a lot because although like you were saying Chloe they are part of each other but

then they obviously differ in a lot of ways throughout the books which we see but especially in this this book in particular so yeah that just really interests me that level of consent between between a human and a demon and that pan's forced to read those books even though he doesn't want to as as you were saying faye in the parts that we're reading about the novel knights at the moment there's a lot of questions that get raised about whether or not yes that you know they can share activities but do they actually genuinely share thoughts and to what extent and so for pan as you say to to either be forced to read this but not only that but to have a feeling of what lyra's thinking and if that feeling is um very different uh to how he thinks she should be feeling and

thinking or how he actually thinks um then that yeah i think in use the phrase cognitive dissonance uh i think they do feel very disjointed um and that must be so painful uh it seems to be most painful for pan interestingly rather than necessarily for lyra but i don't know if that's because she's sort of suppressing that and what she's feeling um in terms of the book books themselves just to go back to the question i think it's really interesting um it's definitely a commentary on something i'm not sure i know what but i I know that I've read some of what Pullman thinks about consciousness and panpsychism. Basically, he's quite sceptical about the idea that, for example, if we were to replicate the physical embodiment of a brain, that it would actually think and be capable of expressing in the same way as a human does. So I think he definitely

has some criticism or skepticism at that level of a kind of physical embodiment of rationality. But I don't know, honestly, where his thoughts are about the rest of the stuff and thoughts about empiricism or postmodernism, post-post-modernism, whatever you want to call it. So yeah, it's really interesting and I wonder how much more he's going to explore there. Yeah. And again, I think this might be what I was getting at in my kind of introduction, initial thoughts on the book that perhaps I've just missed this, but when I was saying that maybe having destroyed God or failed to, however you want to interpret the third book, the Amber Spyglass, perhaps this postmodern view of things is exactly how the church reacts.

That, okay, our objective truth that, you know, God is the answer and all that kind of stuff has kind of been shaken. So we'll flip to a post-modern well everything socially constructive and relative um morality exists so happy days the church can still be an authority as long as you kind of just choose it yeah um that's kind of an interesting take uh so yeah you know as he says in the question um kind of linking to the magisterium and talbot's thinking, that's kind of interesting. Maybe one way of having a religion where you've kind of destroyed God is to be postmodern about religion. So, yeah, I really like this question. As for the sort of dissonance it creates between Pan and Lyra, I'm in two minds about this.

I'm quite rational. I've never been into religion. I think in one of our episodes, we talk about influences or things that you've enjoyed from the books. And as I said at the start of this episode, one is for me, the evolutionary biology in the third book and Richard Dawkins. So yeah, I followed Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for a long time. And a lot of that very rational, scientific thought process and view of the world is mine. And it's something that I grew up with. So I can sort of see the tension between Pan and Lyra, that on the one hand, he's got this inherent sense of wonder and awe and perhaps more mysticism. And isn't there something more to the universe than

just a mechanical process that's happening? And then Lyra exploring perhaps more mysticism and isn't there something more to the universe than just a mechanical process that's happening and then lyra exploring perhaps more of these rational you know scientific ideas um i can i can sort of see i can see the tension between them a little bit in myself yeah it's almost like she's looking again for an explanation when pan's like we lived it we don't need an explanation lyra like we were out there we were in the dust wars yeah yeah we survived them yeah i can feel that tension it really it does hurt it kind of feels uh i don't know if you guys have heard some of the drama and found like jordan peterson like is this the jordan peterson of the his dark materials world with all of his touting like meninism as a normal religious

and psychological and social thing uh you know that's kind of what it feels like and there's this comment and i couldn't find the exact line but pullman said something that was so meta where he was just talking about like ah these flashy young essayists with their you know sharp wit and their hollow words and yada yada it's very obvious how he feels about these kinds of people I really think it was obvious I'm like oh we get it Pullman you don't think very highly of these guys tell us more Philip

I didn't hear you I love that analogy, that comparison to Jordan Peterson is so on point that's how it feels to me because it's quite obvious that pan is real demons are real and yeah i think this is a great point that low that they made that uh that the demons like saying they don't exist is totally what the magisterium is probably trying to get off and as we learned i mean they kind of introduce we'll talk about it when we get to the hotel and the house but they introduce this idea of demons being trafficked, right?

Trafficking demons for pleasure, for joy, or for loneliness, or whatever you're using it to cure for. And that's so taboo. And the idea of trying to erase demons from this society, this world that they grew up in, and these men that have connections to get to other worlds obviously uh they're well-connected authors and even what we learn when we visit brand with pan i almost forgot about it but that poor demon kasima it's just it's a really weird connection and thought process and i know these books are going to be more important but i guess seeing them as something that's giving the magisterium framework to continue on in their studies whether it be separating demons or now it's burning everything down that contains roses um so they can control the crop which like i said just finished dune for the first time and he who controls the spice controls everything so okay we need something happy to talk about yeah let's do it please

mrs lonsdale was that not the best reveal oh my god i was just kidding myself how stupid am i how did i not see this and i'm sure he knows that that clever guy he's like oh that's so clever they'll never have known jerk oh she's so great oh i loved her so so much i'm just like what an absolute legend she is like oh and also i just think i'm hoping against her that there's gonna be a good resolution for her in the final book i don't know if pullman's gonna give it give that to us but i really hope that he does um oh god i so when i was talking about like retconning um earlier and that i can go kind of either way like if it's done cleverly or not i am 100 here for this one oh my god i am just like yeah and it was really difficult for me as well because Rach and I have just

obviously again doing the Northern Lights and um Mrs Lonsdale like is really strict with Lyra and then that's all you really see of her um and I'd already like obviously read La Belle Sauvage and then half of um The Secret Commonwealth and I just had this little grin on my face and I was like but I can't say anything to Rach because she doesn't know I can't tell her I accidentally spoiled for Eliana that Asta settles as a cat and I was like I'm so sorry I didn't

mean to and she's like you just betrayed me but yeah she's such a great character yeah I agree yeah I love her I'm also kind of like really But yeah, she's such a great character. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I love her. I'm also kind of like really hoping I definitely, well, I ship Alice and Brenda, I'll be honest. I really want them to get together.

That's such a good ship. I love that. That is a good ship. I didn't think of that. Well, now you won't be able to not think about it. I think when I was reading when I was first reading The Secret Commonwealth I was on a train with my friend and

when it got dropped that she was Alice I was like but then I couldn't say anything so she was literally sitting in the seat next to me being like what what what and I was like I really can't tell you but oh my god something just amazing has just happened it was a beautiful beautiful moment um yeah i really love her as a character i like that we get to see

a lot more of her here it wasn't it wasn't quite um as much as i was hoping for to be honest uh she comes in quite late i think the small amount you get is so good back chatting to the new master and it's like fuck off so good oh my god uh absolutely awesome where she just gives no ground at all doesn't back down um yeah she's such a powerhouse awesome yeah love alice i feel like alice got a much better treatment than ma costa um i feel like Alice got a much better treatment than Ma Costa. I feel like it's a great improvement from Pullman to see him actually flesh out Alice Lonsdale. And something I love from LaBelle Sauvage, because obviously we can't just talk about Commonwealth with talking about the only thing in the world we have to set it up. Just LaBelle Sauvage. But I love that she wasn't just a pretty girl that was mean or like a like a bitchy girl or something, you know, like she was she never smiled because she had to as a character.

She wasn't like that. I don't know how to explain it, I guess. But I just like the way that Pullman dealt with her, that like she's kind of like she had an attitude and she just did her job and she showed up. And but yet she was the most compassionate and caring person who put her whole life out there on the line to take care of lyra and help malcolm in his journey and uh i think it was really cool to see that fleshed out and to see like a little bit of the history of that she had married young but the guy died and all of a sudden what that's her real name is alice and lyra is just as surprised as us right like in the moment we were all like this is love dale malcolm you guys know each other and first name basis um yeah i i thought it was just the best reveal it made me really happy and i like the way he handled her i really again i feel like

ma costa kind of got the short end of the stick when it comes to the books uh the show i think was interesting that they tried to flesh her out but i think they went an interesting direction and by interesting means an unfavorable one in my opinion yeah um and they just made her i don't know i i she just didn't seem like the ma costa we knew so it was kind of like a toss-up and also it's really easy to have her be in the final battle like really easy like it's so easy that the golden compass did it like yeah but but alice got to do some action now uh earlier we talked about that trigger warning on the sexual assault i won't go into that violence and the details but i did feel like we already kind of knew so there was really no reason for Pullman to reveal that that

way yeah like they could have just looked away and not talked about it I guess whatever he wants to be honest with Lyra in the moment and have her learn everything but we already read it we already really know what happened you could have just been subtle about it I don't know yeah I sort of disagree to some extent because I don't think I really knew knew what happened because it was described in a very vague way in Le Bar Sauvage maybe that's what you mean in terms of like you didn't necessarily need to be explicit about what happened um but I think in a way it's good to have such a strong real feeling character as Alice being like feeling okay to be honest about what's happened to her

with someone that she trusts like Lyra and with Malcolm and Hannah. I don't know. I know Malcolm knows what happened, but I think maybe in that sense it's positive, but otherwise, yeah, it felt like maybe a bit of an unnecessary explanation in terms of what actually happened.

I didn't like how it was framed through her and Malcolm is kind of one issue with it that it was more like well you know Malcolm saved me from the rape yeah okay yeah that's that's what I didn't like and I mean we're gonna talk about Malcolm in just a bit here actually coming up next so I guess we could talk about it more but I just didn't feel like it I felt like kind of like what Faye was saying we didn't get a ton of Alice in this last book, obviously, because she wasn't there like she was in the Mel Sauvage. What we did get of her was strong, and it is strong for her to be able to talk about her experience.

But it did feel, that whole scene in general, almost felt very shoehorned. Like, oh, shit, Lyra has to re-meet all of them and understand everything. Well, time to do a whole synopsis, which he does do in the main trilogy. Two is like, how many times do you open a chapter in the new book the next book and go ah by the way this happened in the last book which is why i'm telling you about it now yeah i um i don't really know how to um how to interpret this one i sort of think it's good to

have these issues fronted up but um I don't know how much of it is almost, I don't know, unnecessarily shining a spotlight on something unpleasant. It's difficult. I sort of admire Pullman in some way, and you know, it's maybe true for the train scene that I'm sure we'll come on to. It feels a little bit gratuitous, but then equally, it would be a shame to chuck this kind of thing into the shadows and not address it head-on um sexual assault happens and i think if people refuse to write about it it's damaging as well so i don't know i'm really in two minds i quite like your point though about it being framed through malcolm so yes maybe that's uh maybe that's what sits

uncomfortably at least about the um the way that that Alice's experience is described. But yeah, I'm really in two minds. and he was a child so maybe he didn't really know what was going on when he saw that um but i think that with alice in this book i think the reason i like i said earlier personally i don't and i don't enjoy reading um about anything like that sexual assault in in books unless it's absolutely necessary for the story which i don't think this is and i think that we don't spend although we get to see alice being absolutely badass which is amazing we don't spend enough time with her to see her then dealing with that um and i think that if we did have that it would be different and the same with lyra with what happens to her towards the end of the book in the train scene i hope that we get to spend time with lyra in the next book while she deals properly with what happened to her. I think that that's the important bit that was missing definitely with Alice.

That's a great way to put it. It just didn't feel in service to Alice. Well, I'm really excited to talk about our favorite thing in the world, which is Malcolm Polstead, the man of the novel, the hero, the guy that knows karate and science, and he's a scholar, and he'll beat you up, and man, he's going to get the girl. Sorry, was that good? Do you think that was a good Malcolm quote? Super great. Every man, Malcolm Polstad, you guys. Oh, God.

It's funny because in the Belle savage i liked him like i know he was a child but like he was great and then like in this book i just feel like honestly like my honest feelings if i can distill it is fucking ew like like i can't get on board with this lyra and malcolm thing like you knew her when she was a baby man like you were like oh sorry i'm just like all over the place with this because i've so many thoughts like i was he was a kid and she's legal though that's the line you want to draw oh god I was actually spoiled on this

I don't know if you guys follow this but I would recommend it there's a twitter account called at men write women and it's all about how men write women so lots of Stephen King in there as you can imagine a couple of Philip Pullmans from here and

there especially within this book and um somebody posted that I think it's actually I did look this up and it's on page 147 and it's um when Malcolm and Lyra are together and he's remembering uh teaching her when she was younger and then he talks about like how actually i'm just i've got the book next to me i'm just gonna look because i want to make sure that i'm getting this right so oh yeah so he is um he starts to become like conscious of how he's being around her and he says but four years later was it still wrong to think about it about lyra now wrong to yearn to put his hands on either side of her face on those warm cheeks and bring it gently towards his oh my god are you reading this I'm so sorry oh god I when I read that and because I knew it anyway because I'd been like like I said I've been spoiled from that picture

I'm actually kind of glad I was spoiled because I was prepared like I think if i'd have just read that and i wasn't prepared i would have been like what the fuck is happening it was a surprise for sure it was kind of a surprise but i think um and we did talk about this in our prediction episode before we um before we went to the the global launch of the book and like read it for the first time i was kind of worried something like this would happen because there was a sort of slightly odd way that pullman described malcolm's response to lyra even when she was a baby and i don't know why but something about that like the way that he was like oh my god from the first moment he saw her he was captivated there's something about that that was a bit like okay this is like slightly weird that he's like so obsessed i'm not saying he was like attracted to her as a baby that's obviously like wait yeah he's not not a pedophile but yeah i don't know but

there's something weird about the way he was setting it up that made me nervous about this was going to happen so i'm also glad like you feaye that I was sort of slightly prepared for it but still not still not ready nor will I ever be really for that um for that particular grouping um it frustrates me a little bit as well because I do actually still like Malcolm as a character I agree that he needs like way more imperfections he needs like not to be this like bastion of everything that is great and good and wonderful and blah blah blah uh yeah he needs to be a bit more real it's like lord azrael without the flaws yeah basically yeah yeah um yeah so he definitely needs to be a bit more flawed um and i would be very much like it if they weren't being put together in a fairly horrible way yeah i i was sort of hopeful that

malcolm would be maybe uh a sort of not totally physically inept nerd i guess is the best way of describing it as an adult like he would he would be in the story as a very intelligent person who was maybe a bit ill-equipped to deal with like violence or physical stuff um that he'd be portrayed perhaps in a cliched way but as a really good engineer and that would be his role but no i mean sure why not get him in there as the explorer the karate kid and everything else maybe pullman was like we already have too many characters. Yeah. As for Malcolm and Lyra, just no. Just like, I mean, even leaving aside being slightly creeped out by it, it's just like, oh, come on.

All right. I guess like the two main characters can get together because you need some romance in the book. It just like, it's just not necessary. It might even have been okay if it was left to the third book, but I just felt like we don't need this to be a love story as well. Yeah. Again, as well, also after coming off of the ultimate love story of Lyra and Will. Yes. It's like the last thing that you want, right?

Exactly. He's like the worst rebound guy. Well, or the best, I guess, if you really look at it that way. Yes, I suppose so, yeah. We could just get rid of him after. I mean, God, it's so obvious to him. I don't... So, I think there's been a couple times where there are some characters that are very obviously self-inserts for Pullman. This is one of them um wasn't malcolm like the nerdy chubby kid in labelle savage the nerdy

chubby ginger and now all of a sudden he's the tall farm body ginger with strong hands and a kind smile he's like a handsome haygrid i don't. I mean, look at his scene with Olivier, right? With Olivier Bandeville. He's all like, oh, you punk ass kid. I'm going to show you and I'm going to go get my girl back. And the line in La Belle Sauvage specifically is that he says that he was her servant for life, wasn't he? Or no? I don't remember.

But it was like very, Yeah, I don't know. It's a bummer because Malcolm was a really good character, and he's still a good character, but he really just piled on the stuff for him, and I think in our predictions, we're going to get into it a little more, but I think he is there.

Maybe it won't be consummated. Oh, God. That's bad. I'm sorry. I said that. I don't think it's going to be consummated. Oh, God. That's bad. I'm sorry. I said that. I don't think it's going to be consummated, okay? Or maybe the dust will just like fall upon them. Who knows? They'll be like banging in the desert.

But this is the worst book. Pullman, I love you, but why did you do this to me? I don't think it'll be consummated but i think maybe there will be a point i think that especially with the stuff we talked about with will and lyra needing to get over will and pan and asta bonded so much not only in labelle but even like as a kid and that electricity pan feels when he realizes that asta is severed as well like makes him go what the fuck like whoa whoa so i don't know if it's just like pan wanted to fall in love with asta and malcolm and lyra refused to and i think there's something going on there because

pan was constantly trying to like be like we could talk to mr polstead and she's like no we couldn't we can fuck right now that's like literally all of the secret common, we can talk to Mr. Polstad. And she's like, no, we couldn't. We can fuck right now. That's like literally all of the secret commonwealth. We can do this. Fuck off, Pan. But I feel like maybe because Pan is trying to get over Will and be able to move on and Lyra obviously is not. Like Pullman said

in an interview that Lyra is surrounding herself by these older gentlemen, by Giorgio, by even hanging out with Polstad because she feels like she's cheating on Will when she's with younger guys. He said something along those lines in an interview. Okay, still doing it.

But it makes me think like it just makes me think that there's gonna be some sort of closure there and I don't think they're gonna be together. Also, what about these migraine auras? Are those going to come back, or was that just like another Pullman self-insert? Because he gets those.

Did you guys know that? I did not know that. No, I didn't know that. Although that's super interesting, because I get them as well. So I'm like, maybe I'm just Malcolm in our world. I feel less good about that now that we've just torn him to pieces. Uh-oh. But yeah, I really like that being

written in because i i get migraine auras as well and his description of them is perfect um so i hope they come back out of personal selfish like oh look that's my experience representation i guess maybe like i always thought they stood out during labelle but especially with the rose oil now i'm like ah, ah, is this going to come back? Like, is he going to be able to go to a world or see a world or do a thing or have a thing? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know, you guys. I don't know. I need this damn book. Really, I read LaBelle Sauvage two days before this book came out, and then I read this book, like, immediately. So I'm dead. dead like it's over so Lyra love interests while we're on the topic of Malcolm

what about the Raylo the Ray and Kylo Ren of the His Dark Materials world Olivier Bonneville and Lyra. Is this the Raylo? Is this an OTP? I don't know. Discuss, discuss.

I had not even thought about that until I read the notes that you'd made. And I was like, wow. Oh my God. I mean, I wouldn't hate it. Like I, I'm not sure how I feel about um like Bonneville it's like I don't want to ship them but I kind of do at the same time like I wouldn't if that somehow got written in I don't think that I'd be I'd prefer that I'd prefer it over Malcolm let's put it that way

oh that's so sad yeah but I wasn't a massive fan of his character either i feel like he could have been a bit more layered and we only saw that one aspect of him incessantly trying to reach lyra and pan so maybe we'll get that'll be explored in the next book but yeah i wasn't huge on on him and his arc yet anyway yeah yeah i agree actually now that you've mentioned it he's not really hugely padded out yet um i i would say it's definitely it definitely feels like a raylo or a or a dromione if i can say that as well i would say yeah so yeah i don't know olivia bonneville is interesting. He's certainly not very likeable at the moment, but he's not as hateful as his dad, at least.

So that's a plus. I know. Get him together with whatever Lyra's friend from the beginning of the book was called. You know, the girl whose dad owned the Rose business. Or Miriam. They can ride off together into the sunset. Like random couple number three imagine the sex

I mean I'm just putting it out there I feel like that could happen there's gotta be fanfic by now does anyone have AO3 open oh my god

that's something I've not even just saying does it exist not even explored I really want to that's I don't know.

Maybe that's something for after the final book. When everything can finally be ruined. Or go down the what fanfic exists. We could have a fanfic episode. We could have a big fanfic out. I'll come to the table with one really

ridiculous smutty one and say this is the one I read about. That would be great. we have to do that um speaking speaking of uh fanfic and sex specifically i had a really really long um where are you going with this i love the way you led i think you should going. I had a really long argument with a friend about whether or not Will and Lyra had sex in the garden. And so I'm very, very annoyed that we got a kind of retcon from

Philip on this that they just kissed. Because in my head, they definitely banged. Yeah. So. Anyway, complete tangent. I think it makes sense, but it's also also it's like you don't have to say it yeah again again i'm just saying like this whole book is pullman just being like well since i'm the author i want you to know this is what happens you guys have all been making rumors up on

reddit.com slash are his dark materials and i see you said that olivia that dynamic is like a big face-off right like that's gonna be a big face-off war it has to be like you you basically are the cause of the death of my dad dude like is he gonna get redeemed maybe in the next book since we're on the raylo discussion oh maybe will there be a redemption arc for olivier bonneville he said not as bad as his dad yeah he certainly seems to be set up in a way that's like as they said fairly one-dimensional and therefore maybe a bit moldable or a little bit gullible in some way yeah i mean he has been working for the magisterium like for fun but is it for fun i mean look at that if you have the skill uh would they let him

go otherwise now no it's true i mean he's not uh yeah he's probably not being forced forced but it's not like he could just openly leave this job now uh the magisterium has proved pretty pretty much a force to be reckoned with obviously as we're reading this book still right like this book has happened um so i mean he is kind of like a character that i think maybe will be redeemed i think maybe pullman has a plan that he will join the good guys that conversation with malcolm uh in the cafe alone kind of proved like maybe he could be more than just like a little rich shit he feels like a really flimsy, like, my father, who invented alethiometers. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Drominey. My father, the inventor of alethiometers. Shut the fuck up, Drominey. I think the best character that we could ship with Lyra though is Dick Orchard A. He's the best grandpa B. I mean

probably the best dick in the county if we're talking about who he is I don't know many other dicks in that county Dick Orchard for president I love him I just I'm taking it back to northern lights but rage and i just got past the chapter where lyra takes a shine to him because he can spit further than anyone that she knew so i was really really excited when he came back in

this book and that is so nice like and i love how um like casual their relationship is too so like i think it mentions that they obviously had a fling, they banged a few times and they stayed good friends and that was it. I think it's really good that Pullman's actually chosen to show that actually you can just have a casual relationship. It doesn't have to be super serious. And that they're both okay with that happening

and that they can be friends outside of that too. And I loved that so much. Like, I was fully like waiting for him when they first introduced him in the secret commonwealth to be like out as some kind of fuck boy. And like the fact that he doesn't and that he's actually a nice guy. I was like, yes, I love this.

Yeah. But he even wears the ascot like you're right total fuck boy you know he has the hair swoop and everything yeah exactly right oh yeah like it's one of the first times we see him again in the secret commonwealth he's like sat in the pub isn't he with like her uh her friends and like a couple of girls like fawning all over him and you're like oh classic fuck boy and then they're like actually no yeah but always chasing out wait wait wait here's a take lyra's a fuck girl oh she did i said what i said always chasing after her she always kisses the boys makes them cry leaves them hanging leaves them in other places you know what i'm saying i'm just saying maybe lyra's the fuck boy like maybe that's not fair to Dick Orchard I mean I don't think so

I think it would be pretty like in sequence with Lyra's personality to be a fuckgirl 100% I think we just learned it happened it's canon now even pre-fucking I mean like Roger just you know left him

yeah I'm onto something love this theory yeah she definitely sold 100 upvotes yeah she definitely displays some kind of fairly toxic femininity

if I can say so to the other girls in the pub in that scene as well which I really don't like but I

yeah I think as you say Dick is great I yeah I think as you say Dick is great I know we just said I love Dick you know another great book by the way Dick is so good and it's really nice as you said Faye that yes they have this amazing amazingly healthy

relationship where they have a fling and there's like clear affection there there was even like maybe some passion there for a while but ultimately he's the first person that she goes to when pan leaves her and that's like a really powerful statement about who he is as a character and how she feels about him which is really yeah really great yeah sexy dude i definitely imagine this guy basically has a livertine leather jacket dope hair and his um demon is a vixen i mean say no more like that guy just mic drops yeah awesome it does feel like she put him in that fuck boy category so that she wouldn't get

close to him yes is kind of how i think it really came across and yeah she does display that really toxic femininity um and she thinks about it which is what i think is so interesting that she's like oh i guess i was awful to those girls that's shitty of me and she thinks like oh that was inappropriate and it kind of shows she is putting on a front here right like she's not letting anyone get close to her get vulnerable with her people see that she's not close to pan anymore and lyra's so lost she's like not really sure where she is so i think that's really important that dick's a character in this and it's also important because it gives her that connection to the gyptians again i feel like i was kind of wondering like does she hang out with the costa family still does she do this does she do that uh this is kind of

what we got but her going back to the fens kind of feels like again that that rite of passage with the hero's journey you know the kids can't go home ever again but now they're going to a different home yeah absolutely and the fact that we get to see photocorum again oh i love him dad and you guys thought he was gonna be dead uh you guys were worried he was gonna be dead and i'm so happy yeah me too big relief instead it was john fa it was john fa instead oh that's that's more acceptable though he went out fighting probably yeah um like yeah father coram would have been absolute heartbreak oh yeah he Yeah. He could die. That's the funny thing.

So it's like, LOL, that you and Serafina could never get over your issues because this bitch won't die. He's still alive. I'm just saying. God. Okay. You guys, the train scene, that train scene. I know we talked a little bit about it we might bring up a little bit of sexual violence again so listeners if you uh don't want to talk about it tune out

what what did everyone feel about the train scene yeah i think i've i've said a lot of my thoughts already but i i could have definitely done without it i could have specifically the sexual assault um i think there are other ways to show Lyra in peril than to submit her to be the victim of sexual assault. I think that the books should have at least come with some kind of content warning. I really wasn't expecting it. I think that the way Pullman wrote it, although I thought how he wrote it was gutting it wasn't I don't think he wrote it in in a bad way it was very shocking um and I yeah I just I don't I don't want it I I hope like we mentioned earlier like with Alice and we were not really given the time

of day with her for her to show us how she processed after her own sexual assault i to say again i hope that we see that journey with lyra and that it isn't just brushed under the carpet in the next book um because i think that would be a bit of a disservice to everyone out there reading it that has been a victim of sexual assault themselves i think that if you're going to put it into a book you need to be responsible with it yeah that's that's a really good point and I must say I I think I mentioned I re-listened to the audiobook in preparation for this but um I first read this whole book probably back in

October when it was first released and I got to the part in the audiobook where this train scene happened and then found other things to do because I didn't really want to listen to it again so I don't necessarily have a very fresh memory of what exactly happened um I don't know I definitely swing back and back and forth on this I think uh if it's addressed properly and if as you say Faye we see Lyra's journey with all of this that's happened to her and how she copes with this um I think it could actually be like a very way a way to make it positive basically or a way to to you know um actively say something and to potentially even help people did it need to happen i i don't necessarily think so but again it is something that does

happen and i think it's a way to show potentially how lyra is being treated differently in this world because of her lack of um lack of a demon at this particular point and yeah i don't know i yeah i haven't really probably processed everything about what i feel about this particular scene yet um i just hope philip delivers on this properly, basically. Yeah, I'd agree. Is it necessary for the story? Definitely not. Is it completely tangential and unnecessary?

Also, no. She is traveling alone in a world that's far more backward, let's say, than our own world. And she's in a part of the world that's even more backward than that uh surrounded by soldiers who are clearly um yeah awful people so it's it's not completely random and just like he wanted to crowbar a scene in for the sake of making making a point or being political or shocking um i agree by the way the fay that i think is really well written whether or not it needs to be in there i think it's actually shocking and, but that's a sign of a good writer. I guess, yeah, I'd agree with what everyone else has already said, that as long as it's now treated well and that it isn't just an incidental scene for the sake of shock value,

then who knows, it might well be pivotal and important. And I do think it's important this kind of thing isn't totally ignored or swept under the rug but one one thing that struck me as you were talking faye that this sort of it doesn't really sit in this book i was you know when i when we first started recording my uh i guess intro remark about this was oh we shouldn't avoid this type of subject but it is way more violent and shocking and distressing than everything else in this book and given that it does feel out of place it's like if he randomly went into a mass genocide in a load of detail it's just not really in the same

tone style or level of distress or heightened emotion or reality, perhaps gritty reality, that the rest of the book is. So perhaps I'm sort of changing my mind. It feels less necessary now that we've started talking about it because it's just not really in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book. The rest of the book is about fairy and magic and arguably some mental distress and people growing up. It's not necessarily about this kind of really, really harrowing life experience. And so, I don't know, it feels a little bit out of kilter in that respect. A book about those issues, totally fair, totally fair as long as it's dealt with carefully. But this isn't that book.

So, I don't know. I'm still kind of divided on it. Yeah. It makes Alice's rape feel like it was a foreshadowing almost. You know what I mean? Like that's kind of something interesting I'm playing with here in my mind because him like having that reveal at the beginning of the book and then book ending the book with this assault almost happening.

And obviously this book is so much more political all of his books are political but so much more political than previous books and the fact that he very much so chose to be in Turkey or in other places and that these soldiers something Lojako Mir pointed out to me they said these guys told her to wear a niqab to be avoided in the future on the train. And a niqab specifically covers the face and not the eyes. It has been, you know, it can be confused with burqas and different things. But in Turkey specifically, women who wear a head covering cannot work in the public sector. In 2008, the parliament tried to lift the ban on headscarves in schools, letting them be worn at school to keep from dissuading against potential applicants getting an education.

But then they appealed that lifting and ruled that law couldn't be changed. So what he intends here showing some, I mean, again, this is a very strongly political book and I know he's very political, but it almost feels a little prejudiced in some parts. It feels like this is coming from him who has been strongly political obviously we all follow his twitter let's be real we see him going off yeah sometimes i'm like grandpa stop yelling but this does come off a little prejudiced um maybe again maybe it's just his view and this world is different, but it doesn't feel like it coincides with current Turkey, some of the events. I'm just not sure. I'm not sure. As to Ian's point, I think Ian made a great point that as he talked, he undid this point, actually.

It doesn't feel necessary, but it's not that it's unnecessary. I mean, the scene was full of action and horror and had me on the edge of the seat, but tonally it was wrong. I think that it felt shoehorned to add another one in. It's starting to feel a little like a device and I think he's just getting a little

creative control over his story. They're adults now, hooray. You can do more, but that doesn'tay you can do more but that doesn't mean you should do more yeah yeah yeah i do like to that point with what amy was saying too and ian that like this is a world where if you don't have your demon you are very much so marginalized um you are open to assault you are a person like you're worthless in humans eyes these soldiers saw her as worthless. Like she had no value as a human.

They could do whatever they wanted with her. She was not under protection of her demon of having a soul. She was soulless. And looking at that in comparison to these books we're talking about by Talbot and Brand, I think this very much so reinforces kind of why those books are out there like that. Those books being out there where people can just believe them and read them openly reinforces this behavior. Yeah. Yeah.

So that was our intense conversation on the train scene. Shall we lay it to rest? Leave it on the tracks? Yes, please. I would like that ian i know you had some thoughts especially about prague and the magician and i would love you to lead this and take us away distract yeah sure so i i love this part of the book being based in prague i think it was great that we went there as a um apart both in our world and in lyra's world great setting scene backdrop all of that stuff um but it just felt super random so yeah lyra visits this magician who has um captured

a sort of demon that has been uh imbued or embodies water somehow uh through an experiment that the father of the uh fire man who is then the counterpart to this water demon um experimented on his uh son i think if i'm not misremembering um and yeah basically sort of pulled them apart but also imbued them with the essence of fire and water and this magician's been experimenting in the on this water demon when the two of them sort of reunite it kicks off some machinery that this magician has um created specifically for the purpose of something we don't know that yeah um but anticipating that when they reunite they'll basically conflagrate and produce this magic steam and like while it was an interesting scene and I was like, oh, this is all super cool. It just didn't seem to go anywhere.

And it took about five years. I read slowly. So, yeah, I really don't know what to make of this. As I was reading through it, I was like, hmm, we're going to get all sorts of stuff about how the alethiometers came into existence. Oh, maybe this person is immortal. Oh, maybe he represents dust. Maybe he's an angel. Oh my God.

You know, like stuff. And it just doesn't go anywhere. It was so odd. And like I said at the beginning, I kind of zoned out when I was listening to the beginning of the scene. So perhaps I've missed context in my first reading of the Secret Commonwealth. But yeah, I enjoyed it but it was super random and I think as well like I this is one of the few parts of the book that I keep coming back to since since first reading it and thinking what does this mean what's this about

this seems to be one of the parts that I feel like is going to come back but I don't know um and I really like that we actually go to Prague because it does seem to be a place that a lot of different things happen and it's a really interesting place historically in our world as well and especially intersecting that with alchemy

and the whole Sebastian Makepeace part and particularly the story in Lyra's Oxford and the idea that alchemists are doing something completely different than what they're saying they are so they remain undetected I wonder if

I've started listening to a really good podcast called The History of Alchemy which is basically about a load of alchemists in our world, very much recommended but I wonder if the alchemists here are going to be doing something they don't want the magisterium to be aware of and that's what

their whole foil about trying to make gold out of lead is about is it's a big distraction a big kind of decoy that they're actually doing something far more important and potentially more related to the secret commonwealth? Big question mark, I don't know so yeah, this is the bit that I get most confused about in the whole book, to be honest.

So yeah, no more thoughts, but questions. Yeah, that's a good summary for that whole area. That whole section of the book. Yeah. That's a good rule, actually. It's a very good rule. But I don't know, what did you guys think? That's a good rule, actually. It's a very good rule.

I don't know. What did you guys think? I think I mentioned this earlier, but I was kind of, I read a lot in bed and I was reading this bit and I was like falling asleep. And I was like, what is happening? I don't understand. And then when I got to the end of that chapter, I agree. It felt like it lasted for a million years. And I was like, what have I just read? And do I need to read it again? But then I was like, I don't actually want to read it again like i was like i'm just gonna i'm just gonna carry on and like see if anything comes of it and then like by the time i got to the end of the book i'd kind of already forgotten about it so i do wonder if we will go back to it in the last book i'm guessing we have to there's a lot of that stuff that those one-offs

that he started i'm hoping we have to i guess is the proper word i should have said there sorry let me adjust my phrasing i'm hoping we have to um i just i don't know i'm pessimistic like ian kind of is about all these plots getting nailed down uh i have reason to be pessimistic being in a song of ice and Fire fan. I've seen this in action already. Like, start all these threads, these plot threads not tying up. I don't know.

But I do wonder if this and, like, a lot of that stuff was just weird. The safe house, all of a sudden, the Magisterium blowing up the safe house, and, like, it turns out

it still happened. It all just happened so fast. It was all over the place. This felt like two books. Yeah.'s true yeah it felt like two books um i don't know how to feel about this but the alchemy stuff is really interesting and i am wondering if that might be about it and even if so if they have something to do with what's inside of the hotel, the blue hotel. Because obviously they're suddenly important. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Just, I don't know. Again, so many questions, not a lot of answers. Sum up the book. So the big ticket that we haven't really gotten to get into yet is kind of something that's around the whole story. It's very fragrant. The roses. What?

The roses. What? What the hell? The Atar of Rose. Like opening this book and that is the new thing. I mean, and I guess I equate it to dust. Yeah. And to getting dust. What the hell? The Atar of Rose, like opening this book and that is the new thing. I mean, and I guess I equate it to dust, but what? Yeah.

And to getting dust, but wow, there is a lot to think about with that, whether it opens up with the production of the roses and the rose water stopping and seeing how it affects all of the authority and magisterium, all these people in power, all the way down to the little guys and the scholars even. What do you guys think about this rose water i i do like how what you just said chloe about how we kind of see the dismantling of like the rose oil factories for want of a better phrase um as we see it from the top to the bottom so we see the effect that it has on like the magisterium and then we go all the way down to the bottom and we see the effect that it has on the workers,

the people that work in those factories and stuff. And I like that aspect of it. But in terms of what it actually does, I know we get like a bit of a hint. And yes, like you said, it's for ICA as well as being equated to dust. But again, we get the groundwork here, but we don't actually get anything more than that,

I don't think. And I think that is something that will probably again be explored in the next book. Yeah, I'm very confused about this one. Possibly more confused about Prague even, which is impressive. I think a lot of the time there seems to be an allusion

to like big pharma sort of thing, people getting involved which kind of doesn't really exist in Lyra's world so I wonder if like roses was a starting point of what Philip Pullman would think like well if they don't have like as developed

pharmaceuticals then maybe roses? Botany? I don't know. But it's definitely not what i expected to be a key plot point of this book like we didn't predict roses um i also think there's lots of interesting stuff in terms of the idea that you know the very specific conditions in which they grow potentially my theory or thought is that they grow in an area without dust, potentially, or grow in an area without demons seems to be something odd going on. So there's a poem in this that gets referred to as kind of a love story

of two people who meet and fall in love or spend some time in a rose garden. I wonder to what extent that's drawing some parallels between Lyra and Will, especially because, and this is maybe like a big stretch so I'm just going to limber up a bit for this one, but I was reading Demon Voices recently and Pullman was talking about the final illustration that he did for the final chapter of the Amber Spyglass and in the end he ended up going for a picture of two flowers intertwined but always facing away from each other and to me they look like roses there's my speculative stretch for the day that is um something that i'm wondering if if this love

story this poem this epic tale about these two kind of like ill-fated lovers um is in some way talking about lyra and will's destinies again but i don't know that's super good like that yeah i i don't know what to make of the roses i keep trying to find a way that this trilogy will be as uh sort of grander scale as the first so you know if the um his dark materials trilogy was about you know, his Dark Materials trilogy was about, you know, finding and destroying God. And it included these fundamental particles that pervade the entire universe and are the source of consciousness. Yeah. What is this trilogy's equivalent of that? The best smelling roses, obviously. roses are important how could that possibly feed back to some kind of universe-wide all generation encompassing whole of humanity important thing and i'm stumped i i really don't know i'm going

to assume that until well until third book and proven otherwise that this trilogy is just on a slightly smaller scale and that um roses might be in some way be to do with, yeah, like you said, either how dust affects demons, what makes demons settle, or, yeah, some connection to a dustless part of the world. Obviously, The Secret Commonwealth is the title, so I'm going to fall straight back to that, and that maybe the rose oil is a way of humans keeping in touch with or preventing humans getting in touch with one or the other.

The Secret Commonwealth and the World of with one or the other um the secret commonwealth and the world of fairy or the spirit world uh so maybe the magisterium are you know suppressing it but i don't know yeah but also it is called the book of dust so and it has similar properties potentially to um the malefa oil the seed pod oil in that it can help you see dust or see humans interactions with things so there's that as well who cares who gives a shit like yeah why why pullman why yeah yeah that is the question like why did you write this like why uh i the oil part of it like and the fact that it kind of opens you up to visions very much so like the third eye opening um it seems like and the scarcity of it seems like a big problem like why are they freaking out so much it must obviously do something that keeps something

running uh and for the magisterium to try to like seize it all why would that happen well i feel like we've seen a little bit of how it does some like acid-esque hallucinogenic you know genic kind of stuff but um i earlier to track back to what amy and i were chatting about with when pullman maybe even thought of all this i really do think that he has been planning this at least in part since the 90s i think he's always seen part of this because if we track back to chapter Trapanning from The Subtle Knife, which we just covered, so it's very fresh in my mind. When Lyra is talking to Mary Malone

and she reads the alethiometer to her, three images come up, camel, garden, and moon. What it says, Lyra told her, it's saying in my language, right, the language of pictures, like the alethiometer. What it says is that it could use ordinary language too, words, if you fixed it up like that. You could fix this so it puts words on the screen, but you'd need a lot of careful figuring with numbers. That was the compasses, see, and the lightning meant ambaric, I mean electric power, more of that of that and the angel that's all about

messages there's things it wants to say but when it went on to that second bit it meant asia almost the farthest east but not quite i don't know what country that would be china maybe and there's a way you have in that country of talking to dust i mean shadows same as you got here and i got with the i got with the pictures only their way uses sticks i think it meant that picture on the door but i don't understand it i thought when i first saw it there was something important about it only i didn't know so there must be lots of ways of talking to shadows oh so interesting wow i know right i was ready i'm like i'm gonna blow y'all's mind so this is the subtle knife this is 97 publication uh this is talking about the yi jing we just talked about this in depth using the

gyro sticks uh this is really interesting that somehow it harkens back to china and then in the lantern slides that as of 2007 were published with all of the new published books. Each book has a set of lantern slides where they chat different snippets, chats, everything that Pullman kind of played around with and just left in as a note for us to enjoy. And there's one about our favorite Sir Charles Latrum. I say that sarcastic. Run him over with his goddamn rolled voice. Eat the rich. Sir Charles Latram every morning applied two drops of a floral oil to the center of a large silk handkerchief,

which he then bundled and tucked into his top pocket in a meticulous imitation of carefree elegance. He couldn't have named the oil. He'd stolen it from a bazaar in Damascus. But the Damascus of another world, where the flowers were bred for the flesh like exuberance of their scent as it developed throughout the day the fragrance of the oil rotted like a medlar sir charles would lean his head to the left and sniff appreciatively perhaps too frankly for the comfort of most companions so this is from the subtle knife slant room slides as of 2007 yeah that's really interesting yeah i still don't know what it means in there

no i don't really know what it means but looking at like the religious connotations uh it does make me think of like frankincense and myrrh and you know all the different things they put in the the thingies and i was i was raised catholic but i'm recovering um but the you know when they like put the scents out and the incense is out during mass, it makes me think of that, and it makes me think of how it's been such a holy water for these people. And now that it's running out and the Magisterium's seizing it, there has to be a reason, because it has to activate something or do something.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, we'll have to see. This one has me stomped completely. Yeah, same. yeah we'll have to see this this one this one has me stumped completely yeah same well i think that especially once we get over to talking about the hotel in a few minutes uh i think that it's all wrapped up in those houses in those mysteries and that doesn't really help obviously because those are also mysterious but i think it's all gonna come together and i do think he has a long game and i just don't effing know what it is but he obviously has been thinking about it for a while right like this isn't just something that he's just well some of it might be pulled out of his ass but

i think he's trying to connect that that's heartening at least yeah can i just say one one other quick thing that like it relates to what i was saying before about what i was trying to find in it that so far at least it's less satisfying than the first trilogy because even even from northern lights you know that dust is this um highly important thing that the entire world cares about and is somehow, you know, linked very strongly to demons and growing up. And you quite quickly at the end of the first book, the first trilogy,

understand that it's of universal importance to every conscious being. It's critical. And I do find it frustrating that while I'm looking for that in the rose oil, it's not, there's not enough that's drip fed to really get me interested. mean i'm curious but with dust you're like right i'm there let's go let's get this adventure done whereas with the roses i'm just kind of strokey beard yes interesting well hmm uh there's not enough exposition provided as to why they're important to really captivate me like dust did in the first trilogy i think believable as the main concept of this trilogy since it wasn't even introduced

it's just not believable i think that um for dust as well the reason personally why i enjoyed learning about just so much is because we were learning it from lyra's point of view as a child and we were getting all of this information like drip fed um as you mentioned but through lyra learning it from other people and like being our little scavenger lyra like trying to like put together all this meaning and because she's a child there's a level of innocence to it to her trying to find out what's going on and i think that with the rose oil the reason why i wasn't that into it in this book is because okay so we do see lyra when she's talking to her friend at the beginning of the book they do talk about it a little bit but most of what happens with it lyra's absent so we've got

everything going on with the rose oil um and it's all very political and there's loads of different stuff happening but we're not learning it through lyra anymore and i think that was the reason why i kind of wasn't as into the how it was uh laid out for us in this book yep yeah i guess that last book is gonna have to do a lot of convincing a lot of legwork i hope that that book is doing arm day it's gonna be holding up the entire series that is silly to think about though right like uh everybody's pretty pissed about the last season of game of thrones but uh there's a lot of broad stroke themes that yes like obviously it's gonna be shitty writing any adaptation like not everybody's as lucky as we are that we did get a redo and we got this adaptation that's so thorough in the show i mean there's a lot of

stuff that i complained about and eliana complained about but it's a very great adaptation from book to show and season eight of game of thrones i mean that left a sour taste people who argued with me for years that the show was the best thing since sliced bread have now blocked me on social media like let me just put it out there like they, they're like, fuck this show. Fuck this series. I spent my life on Game of Thrones. And I'm like, okay, but who's fault is that? And like, tell me about it, sister. So have I. But my God, I have a backbone here.

But will this be, like, if this book doesn't tie up, how do you think the fandom's going to react to that? I don't know. It's a pretty positive fandom. I mean, Malcolm's bad. Yeah, that's true. That's a taste of it. that's a taste of it right there well we're close to getting to our cliffhanger but I did want to comment on

what about Princess Cantacazino and of course of the girl that Pan meets too what about all that that just got shoehorned into the end I finished it yesterday and I forgot like how it's just too for me I said this earlier but it was just too many characters

like I did enjoy the princess as a character and if she wasn't and I agree with you that she was shoehorned in if they'd have found a better way to get her in there then fine and also like Pan and the little girl like it was just fine like

I'm just there was just too much for me going on anyway to kind of make room in my brain for for more people that I have to kind of get on board with and learn about yeah and I think I guess to be fair which is the the girl who Pam meets who is like then demonless I think it was like a fairly neat introduction of her but I think she was added fairly last minute because um uh you you guys probably know the introduction of her but i think she was added fairly last minute because um uh you you guys probably know the backstory of this but like basically there was an auction to raise money for um grimfell tower victims which is like a big uh tower in a um a big fire in a tower block in london where loads of people died very trag. And it was kind of a big scandal in terms of it not being fit,

a fit building to be inhabited and all sorts of horrible stuff. And that character is actually named after one of the victims in the Grenfell Tower. So I think he'd already written the book by that time. So he kind of retrospectively inserted her name, but then has a plan for her in the next book where she's going to be expanded more so i think i can see how as an author if you wanted to do something like that it'd be quite difficult to do that well given the kind of time constraints and when all of that was happening versus when he was needed to publish um so i'm

kind of excited to see what's going to happen with that character but equally yeah it was a bit like okay so there's a random other person here now uh and i wonder if we're going to get much more of that in the next book anyway with the whole um i don't remember what the book's called but the book of addresses and the book of names and the book of stories basically about all of these people who don't have demons i feel like lyra's going to keep meeting loads of random people um so i'm sort of buckling up for just meeting lots of characters that may or may not return um i found the princess quite interesting though in terms of uh what specifically happened with her demon the idea that a demon could fall in love with someone that you're not in love with but then also she was kind of in grew to be in love with her she didn't seem to

I think at first I thought is it just because she's kind of closeting herself and she is actually in love with this woman but she's not allowing herself to be in love with this woman but then it doesn't seem to be the case because she seems to be quite happy with being reasonably out publicly and living with her

and performing with her so it's very confusing but like kind of a beautiful story in a weird way i quite liked that part that's kind of how i felt about it it's like this is a great short story and now we'll go back to the book um yeah and again it kind of hawks to that point that i was saying earlier about how i really enjoy learning about like how demons and humans can interact and the different like taboos and laws around it and like seeing that

her demon fell in love with somebody else I really loved that bit but I completely agree with you Ian it was definitely a short story it could have been a lantern slide for the new ones I also got the feeling a little bit like I don't know if any of you play computer games but she was a bit of an NPC

you just kind of have this random discussion it's not related to levelling up your character or progressing but cool, thanks game developers for putting this in there there's so many NPCs in this book like that little black book of addresses are just all the NPCs yeah, it's the same a little bit with the alchemists

in Prague maybe all this stuff comes back together or maybe it's just a random series of events it does feel like a quest right like she has to go complete all the quests so that she can gain the knowledge she's looking for to survive this series yeah yeah i don't actually know what the point of her doing those things is i I just know it feels like she is. Yeah. That might be my problem with it. I really don't know.

I guess the point of that is to show her life can be lived without your demon, with not being in love with your demon anymore, with not loving yourself. You can live a life full of self-loathing. It's supposed to be some sort of story to really show Lyra or help Lyra later, help her see like, oh, maybe I need Pan or maybe this is awful after all. And I can't live like that. But I feel like we didn't get that. We didn't get like a reaction about that. We just got her going, hmm, interesting conversation.

Yeah, exactly. It did feel like him flexing. Like what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and it was just too much and I mean I'm saying all this and right now I'm thinking about you guys we didn't even fucking talk about the poem so true

feelings about it in a minute when we talked about it like so much in a way this princess felt like an alternate world Lyra like for her kind of like this is what you will become if you don't fix this this is the ghost of demon past you know and a fun fact that so the princess's name cantacuzino there that was a romanian aristocratic family developed uh out of a branch of the byzantine cantacuznos family specifically from the emperor john vi cantacuznos uh so i thought that was a cool little reference

i'm always finding he's using something real world for anything but yeah i don't know if there's anything to be taken much from that it was again a fun short story i love those little pullman gems where you're like oh cool that exists no idea what to do with that information, but cool. Yeah, in four years' time when we get onto our chapter by chapter of this book, we'll get the research out then. Yeah, interesting. We have our calendars full for like

five years. Yeah, right. I can't wait. I'm already thinking like, and then when we have Amy on for this episode, and then when we talk about it, we'll come back for that. Then when we get Faye, when Rachel gets to finally read the book i mean when eliana gets to read the book we have so many possibilities you guys well i don't really feel passionately about the poem right now i do feel passionately about it but i feel like that's like another hour-long discussion yeah there's a lot

in the hotel in the red house i think whatever the answer to the poem is is going to be wrapped up in the hotel in red house we did get especially from strauss's notes a lot of that information already so i feel like there might be some foreshadow being played with there yeah i agree i don't know what do you guys think about the hotel in the red house i like i like it as like a concept um that there's another place we kind of touched on it earlier where like harking a little bit back to the land of the dead where there's a place where just demons are instead of a place where just humans are um i think that intriguing i don't think we've learned that much and also the fact that it has like so many different names like threw me off so confusing so it's like yeah right so it's like okay yeah you're still talking about the blue hotel cool

all right um but yeah i to be honest i don't have a ton to say about it i'm intrigued to see where it goes i'm excited to to kind of see what the sacrifice will be um i have a couple of thoughts on that but we'll get to that in when we think when we talk about what we think is going to happen in our predictions yeah i think this is one thing again there's a few of these that i'm confused by and haven't really properly thought about yet if that makes sense so um yeah i haven't really processed much of this yet i have no idea what the sacrifice could be so excited to hear your your theories yeah i also wonder if there's any kind of um real world basis for this any kind of like folkloric traditions or if it's fully fully from pullman's imagination i really don't

know i'm just excited to see what happens next really yeah i'm the same if you read into hotel okay what does that mean temporary stopover while you're on a travel somewhere else maybe it's a place where demons who are separated from their humans go as a respite between the real world and the spirit world maybe as part of that it's a gateway um but i don't know that would feel like a bit of a rehash of the whole world of the dead so i don't know i wouldn't i wouldn't be averse to that kind of thing um but yeah tricky uh we're not we're just not given enough it's it's a bit like the i feel like we're very down on this book i did enjoy it let's return to that but um yeah

while it while it was good and it's intriguing there's almost just not enough given to be able to conjecture like this or feel really excited for book three because you're going to get an answer to a specific question it's just all open-ended and yeah the blue hotel is another one i'm a bit um don't know really uh maybe a gateway i do think there's something to be said about a portal of some sort because it feels like obviously from the and everything that we read of like strauss's notes is kind of informing this and so is the poem i guess i feel like that's what we should read to inform this but i also feel like it's so much like comparative work there's this line in the beginning and i think it's selling in predictions

fey and i seem to be aligned in a similar thought process but uh there's this line that strauss wrote in his journal that says so we must investigate and the inevitable consequence of that is that one of us must go in and the other must return with the knowledge we have gained so far there's no alternative none and we cannot do it uh so it just seems like people that go in do not come out the demons don't come out the souls are trapped i don't know if there is a portal and they're going somewhere um if the rose water is deliberately a part of it i think the rose water probably is it seems it's some sort of potent magic uh but the why is really still there what's in the hotel what's in the house like i don't yeah i do think pullman

drew the name from somewhere i don't see much to really pull historically to give me any big answers but uh he calls it elkan al-azraq the blue hotel And there is in Jordan a place called Qasr al-Azraq called the Blue Fortress. It was surrounded by desert, but it had the only water for like hundreds of miles. And it's most famous for being where T.E. Lawrence held up 1917 to 1918 during the Arab revolt against the Turks. And there are animal drawings and inscriptions and carvings at the gates, if you look carefully the entrance gates so i'm guessing this is where he drew the name from that's really cool with the blue fortress wow yeah yeah i had no clue and i was like oh that makes sense it's literally ella's rack yeah and if there are animal carvings around the gate that could be a little uh bit of inspiration for you know a portal for demons um interesting good research yeah great research

we gotta have a couple in here i just there has to be more i just don't and i think it's really going to come down to the poem i mean there's the big tone of sacrifice in that poem that i think we're about to talk about in the predictions and I don't know there's a lot to go through for this there's I think it's again like we've been saying for a second book yeah I wonder if we'll change our minds on it when we've read the third one probably I hope so I hope so I have still enjoyed it yeah and I did enjoy this book uh we'll talk about our final thoughts later but like i did enjoy it i don't mean to harp on it but it was a very different read very different

what about that cliffhanger oh what about it yeah i am i couldn't help disappointed is the wrong word but i just really wanted to see lyra and pan together again at the end um and i i kind of know that was too much to hurt for because we've got a third book coming and there'll probably other points that that happen uh maybe even before we see them reunited because we don't really know the gap in time that's going to be between the two books we don't know if it's going to like start right from where they're back together in the hotel or whether it's going to jump ahead in time again so i i'm never the biggest fan of a cliffhanger because i want to know immediately so like i i think that like if the third book was in my hands right now and I'd started

reading it I'd be like oh hell yeah what a great cliffhanger because I've got the answer in front of me but but with it being obviously in the word cliffhanger I'm not gonna have that for a while so yeah and I remember I was like getting when I was like frantically trying to finish it I was getting further and further towards the end and like Lyra was getting closer and closer to the hotel. And I was like two pages and I was like, oh my God, they're not going to be reunited in this book. And I was like, no, this can't happen. And it did.

It's so painful. It's so painful. Yeah, I agree that it's completely frustrating not knowing how long it is to wait. I think that makes it kind of a lot worse and a lot more frustrating in terms of um i was expecting maybe like three or four different threads to be opened up in this book and not completed i wasn't expecting the like 157 that we've actually had whatever it actually is you know so um i'm completely with you it's kind of like

ah i have so much to process but I have none of the tools to process it with because I don't even know what's going on um I think yeah I'll talk a bit about some of my predictions in a bit but um I know that Pullman loves a good cliffhanger so I was expecting it but oh I'm so frustrated right now. I really need the next book, basically. So, yeah. Yeah, I liked this whole end of the book, though. Cliff, hang on a side.

It felt like returning almost back to the style of the previous books. So, you know, Lyra's got this guide whose name escapes me, the camel dude. Yeah, anyway, well. has got this guide whose name escapes me the camel dude uh yeah anyway well um and and you've got bonneville with the rifle and it's a little bit more plot driven with a clear aim clear goal you know two or three people being considered rather than 500 uh so i really liked the way the book ended like the style of the book kind of almost came back around again for maybe the final quarter or so um i don't really mind the cliffhanger because it almost felt like, again, we've been maybe a bit too harsh on this book, but it felt a bit like a relief of, okay, well,

at least we're at the end of the book and something is left, you know, to be explored. So that's good. Yeah. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm intrigued. But as I kind of said before about the, what does this rose water, rose oil mean? I'm intrigued, but not absolutely captivated. So it's a cliffhanger, but with a little bit of a bitter edge to it. Because, yeah, it's not a cliffhanger that just leaves me absolutely dying for the next book, but more like, okay, well, you know, when that comes along, I guess some of these things will be answered. Yeah. Well, you know that like nothing bad's going to happen to Malcolm. Right? Like that's kind of the bummer of the cliffhangers.

Yeah. And I do like what you're saying that we just returned home finally. Like it's starting to feel like his dark materials again. La Belle Sauuvage was very weird and i freaking loved it but it was so strange it was fantastical it slowly became this crazy flood journey that got stopped by a trippy dream and then you know kept going and then somehow lyra ended up at oxford and cool but this feels like pullman kind of pulling back and having us rationalize with logic right like with all of this like thinking and like oh everything is as it seems all of these little bits of uh ain randy and

bullshit that he peppered in in the beginning yeah it does feel very like now we're going to use reason and logic so by the end of this book returning to like an action scene and like no malcolm no lyra like felt good it did feel. It felt like we are back in the series. I feel like we're going somewhere now. I feel like it's got a lot to wrap up. Just a lot to wrap up. Like there's so much to explain and I really hope there's some underlying

common denominator that we're just missing and that we're going to feel so stupid about. Yeah. All right, well, let's talk about some predictions and some final thoughts on the book we have uh we've kind of made it so far in discussing this i know we didn't get into the tajik poem as much as i would have wanted to but i just i feel like that's going to take a team of goddamn professional you know in like a magnifying glass to say ah so this means that Malcolm's gonna kiss Lyra at this angle and when she does the dust is gonna explode

I just don't know what do you guys think about predictions for the final book of Dust? I think that there are so many as we've mentioned there are so many different strands that it's kind of impossible to predict really much at all because literally anything can happen as we saw

from la belle sauvage to the secret commonwealth i would never have guessed it was going to jump like 20 years into the future so who knows i think i do have like a couple of predictions for the sacrifice i i know you said chloe that you think malcolm will be okay but i think that he might die the hero so i don't think i think he'll be okay when we open the book i think that's the only way to do it is to kill him yes the only way for any of this to be okay i know that sounds dramatic because it is but like there's no way that any of this makes sense without that yeah so i think that he's going to find lyra because obviously he's already on pursuit of her anyway and they're both going to go into the hotel together and he's going to be the sacrifice or will will be the sacrifice or something along those lines. Boo. That'd be so good.

Boo. How do I kick her off the Skype call? Does anyone know? I'm so sorry. This is not something that I want because I love Will, but I think that that's something that Pullman might do to us to bring Will back to then kill him. I know.

Stop booing me. I don't want it to happen either. But to that credit, I'm going to argue with you because how could he bring him back to kill him when he's going to be a doctor? Yeah. He could be a doctor, he could turn up and be like, hey I'm a doctor

and then he dies. Will is a 21 year old doctor? I don't know. I don't know about that I see through your theory Faye how dare you how dare you oh I'm so sorry and I would love to

see Yorick again because we're going to Central Asia and we know that that's where the bears ended up if we see Yorick again I'm going to lose my shit I would be so excited for that um i don't know in what way um or how that would happen but i would love to see lyra and yorick interact if only for just one last time during the book so i would love that yeah that would be so good um i don't have a lot of predictions at this stage.

I have a kind of simple one in the same way that the first trilogy was Lyra's book and the first and last word in the trilogy was Lyra. The first word in The Secret of Commonwealth is pantalimon, just saying. So I think the last word in Book of Dust Volume 3 might be pantalimon. So good. Such a specific prediction. Dust Volume 3 might be pantolimon. So good. Such a specific prediction. The final word will be pantolimon. Honestly.

But you know how smug she's going to be if she's... Oh, yeah. Watch out, it's Malcolm. Oh, man. Oh, I'll be so angry. Yeah, so that's like a very, very simple prediction i also agree slash hope slash give my undying um last breath to the fact that yorick must appear again um i would really like if they address some of that in terms of like um emigration and uh climate change and like people being forced to move, basically,

and set up elsewhere. I wonder if that's going to have affected the witches as well, because we know that their well-being is very tied to nature. So if there is ice melting in the north, does that mean that the witches are also being displaced?

So basically, I'm hoping that they'll go to the Himalayas and they'll just be like, Lyra and Yorick and the witches all hanging out having a good time i'm gonna be happy and it's gonna be great um and then the final prediction i'm gonna give is i'm very kind of intrigued by the quote-unquote men from the mountains and um also the giant bird thing which sounds badass but no idea what that's going to be but anyway um the men from the mountains i have a feeling that's going to be some sneaky part of uh i really want to call him marcus marcel delamere's marcus delaware yeah um marcel delamere's plans to basically build some kind of crusade.

And I can't quite decide if Marcel Delamere is going to be somehow puppeteering both sides of that crusade or only one side. is that basically he's behind the men from the mountains and uh he will be kind of pushing pushing both together and forming some kind of holy war basically cool but yeah i'll pick up from that then so malcolm's gonna die that's that's for sure despite will's despite will's best endeavors to save him with his doctor powers yeah maybe uh i i hope that will uh does travel through the spirit world via blue hotel and ends up with lyra in some sense um that would just be bang they finally bang and that's written in like explicit detail lyra and will did have sex that day. Exactly.

Full penetration, full stop. That's the final word. Oh my God. Not pantalimon. It's penetration. Yeah. Yeah, I also, I like the idea of a kind of crusade holy war. I would like something on that kind of grander scale.

It might be a bit of a rinse and repeat, the Amber Spike blast, but I would embrace that. So yeah, I hope some way a combination of Lyra Will and Malcolm unlock the secret commonwealth or the spirit world and basically all kinds of spirit creatures come out and basically wage all hell war on the magisterium and that's how it falls and that's how the Republic of Heaven gets built in Lyra as well

that would just be super dope that would be good can I ask a quick question what do you think is happening with the Delamaires and Marissa Coulter and all of that stuff do you think anything else is going to surface about Marissa Coulter's past and the Delamere as a family?

I hope so. I mean, Mrs. Coulter is one of my favorite characters, or if not my favorite character. I would love to learn more about her. I think he has to canonize her being separated from her demon. Because I think it's very obvious

she is, and there's stuff in northern lights that really speaks to it there's stuff in subtle knife that speaks to it and then the show obviously kind of declared it as a show canon thing i think that that might come out in the next book i think it has to yeah i also loved the idea um that at some point the collectors will make sense as a show but i'm not sure if that's possible from a storytelling point of view, because I don't know how you make that story make sense, because it's so confusing. But maybe Marisa called to time travels.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. What if we find out she's not dead? That's what I was wondering. Oh, my God. Don't play with me like that.

Oh, my God. What if she didn't die and Asriel what I was wondering. Oh my god. Don't play with me like that. Oh my god. What if she didn't die and Asriel did? Thank god. Oh god. Yeah, because Asriel had a head wound, didn't he? So he would probably die, but she would just be like falling eternally, so therefore not technically dead. I mean, no one can kill that bitch.

She just eats his dead body. It's a sign of respect for your friend, okay, Ian? Just ask Yorick. Great reference. I do think we're going to see Yorick. I'm like really convinced now because when he speaks to Will before they go, he says, Will says, so you're not making war.

And Yorick's like, our old enemies vanish with the seals and the walruses. If we meet new ones, we know how to fight. They're in the mountains in Central Asia, you guys. Yeah. They're going to show up. I mean, that's like Chekhov's bear gang. For sure. Just put a bear gang out there without like, they have to happen.

That is a right there, straight up Chekhov's. It's going to go off at some point. So I love the idea of the witches. I totally didn't think about that. But then I was sitting here and I was like, we't not see seraphina pekala right that's illegal that's illegal so i just had a massive reaction and ian staring at me like i'm a crazy person but like either bear v bird or bears birds and witches all fighting together i can't decide if the big bird is evil or not but bear i think it's gotta be good i gotta be good right

it's secret commonwealth right so like bear bird bear bird witch battle thing oh it's gonna be so good oh yeah well the implications are then if this is really about that secret commonwealth then all of these peoples will rise up against this oppression you know and lyra will lead this absolutely last war and i do think like that left it open that line and amber spyglass leaves it open that if they meet new enemies we know how to fight well yes la maison just is not a really a new enemy it's the same goddamn enemy with a new fucking puppet at the end but i don't know like and we don't know maybe marcus delaware might end up being like switch sides at the end I mean there's still room for that he

might like be like oh the memory of my sister I must protect that or some shit who knows the error of his ways like Lyra holds up a fucking cross and is like repent sinner that's what I want to see next book I do want to pull out a line that so Eliana brought this up in our discussion uh if you guys have listened at all, we keep our spoilers at the end. And I get to monologue like an evil villain because she still has not finished the book. And I like just talk to myself and hope it sounds good and hope everyone likes it. But the other day, Eliana in our discussion, this is the first time she's gotten to participate in the La Belle Sauvage discussion. This is the first time she's gotten to participate in the LaBelle Sauvage discussion.

And she was reading this quote that Malcolm talks about, and she was talking about it with relativity and a bunch of other stuff and some philosophical stuff. But she read Malcolm talking to Hannah and saying, the connection would be here in our minds, but not there. If we can think about that other world, we could see a connection, even if there was no one there to see it and when she read that my wheels just went holy shit and started turning and now i'm about to disappoint you guys with i think we will see will but he won't see us oh that would be devastating but i think it's important so to tie you all back into this theory i've peppered you with little thoughts through the episode that i'm now going to bring up so excited because i can't tell her this you guys and i'm screaming like i'm just straight up sitting here internally just going what the so the whole idea of malcolm and pan like being in love with asta and malcolm and lyra refusing

to be open to Malcolm in general. Yes, gross, creepy. We've moved on. But she refuses to like let herself love. She refuses to be vulnerable. We see it with Dick. We see it with Malcolm. And Pan obviously is open to love.

Like this kid's out there looking right now. He's like, who wants to be my new human? You know, like he's out there. He just wants to fix Lyra. But at the same time, you can't move on through life with that isolation that Lyra keeps doing to herself. like who wants to be my new human you know like he's out there uh he just wants to fix lyra but at the same time you can't move on through life with that isolation that lyra keeps doing to herself so i think in order to get over will she will have to see him one last time and she probably will have the choice to be able to bring him there almost like the uh the stone in harry potter right yeah resurrection stone like this is her chance. Like she could,

I think this quote very much so had to do with the same thing because she sees Olivier Bonneville, right? And she thinks it's Will in that dream and all of these weird, like ways of reading the alethiometer and the new ways. I'm wondering if the Rosewater is going to be the key to her being able to read the alethiometer with the way that the angels spoke about the ancient way and she'll be able to see will and she will choose not to utilize that for

bad and she will choose to let him go on and live his life and she will move on with her life and malcolm will most likely sacrifice himself and be the sacrifice in that tajik because thank god at least pullman can just let him die a hero because that's what he wants i think that malcolm will die for that and lyra will understand like that you can let yourself love and you can let yourself move on even when you're hurt and let people back in and i think that's going to be seeing will and like malcolm dying i think all of that is going to be what lets her move on that's beautiful and then can you just yeah it really is yeah if you want i'll have secret commonwealth part two done by next

i don't know that's kind of just the feeling i'm getting yeah i think that's valid and i all i want at the end as well is if that happens which i think it there's potential for it definitely to happen is for then lyra to learn that she can love again and then go home and you know just bang dick again because they love doing that i think i honestly i don't think you're wrong i think it couldn't if she did go back to dick like she acted like you know she didn't have time for him but the way he looked at her and the way he offered her support and help even though she's mistreated him in the way of like he's just a fuck buddy whatever you know um he's that's her side guy like i don't

know she's obviously very much so ignored him and like he has more feelings than just banging you know on the side he obviously likes her he gave her his grandpa's address it was like go hang out my grandpa he'll take care of you yeah i think that's an important thing that to have a partner supportive like that and he would take her back if she came to him i was like i want to date you for real he would go fucking finally oh my god i've been with this girl for like 12 years threw freaking mud at me in the yard um and i think maybe she will give him a chance maybe that's how it will end it won't end with her uh like hate fucking olivier beautiful virginity losing sex together you know for the first time both of them um but i'm just

kidding uh but it won't it won't end with that it just might end with hope yeah right it might end with her having hope towards trying to let someone get close to her again because the separation from pan followed by the separation from will as like two huge cuts two very big cuts and she spent so long and so much time saving the universe that she never came to grieve for losing her family that she never knew she even had even if they were evil from losing the people that were closest to her that encouraged her um from age taking people like john faugh she's never gotten the chance to grieve ever in her life she's just gone on so very true i hope we see a lot of that i think as a final note for me that's what i want to see out of the next book is see lyra get to cope and get to grow up from that pain and get to leave that pain in the past and learn from it and get to be a full-fledged scholar and do good always

like she does yeah definitely perfect ending 100% agree well what do you guys think about your final thoughts on the secret commonwealth I didn't love it i think it might be out of the books that we have uh in the series from pullman i think it's my least favorite but then like i said that might change when we get the last book it that's happened to me before where i've i've disliked a middle book in a in a in a series and then i've had the context of reading the final books and thought, oh, actually, I like that a lot. So I'm hoping that's going to happen. Yeah, there were too many characters for me,

but I did love Lyra and Pan and their relationship and how heartbreaking it was. I do kind of commend Pullman for doing that because he could have easily put us back into a world where everything was fine with Lyra and Pan and then something else happened and they had to tackle it together but to pull them apart I think was very clever and I did love that but yeah I'm hoping in the last book that it'll tie as much as it can together and then give us the closure that we want and then i think when that

happens maybe i'll go back and read this book again to see if i feel differently you'll forgive him potentially yeah i absolutely agree i think it is a classic difficult um middle book i really hope that we come to love and appreciate it. But I think you need that kind of hopeless middle section where a lot of it's being driven and a lot of what's going to be concluded in the final book has to be set up. I also think that we do get like led down a lot of different paths.

I think it would have been nicer to be honest to have um fewer narratives going on at the same time or maybe fewer different perspectives though i also contradictorily quite like that we get to be in malcolm's head we get to be in marcel delamere's head we get to be in olivia bonnieville's head we get to be in lyra's head we get to be in pan's head but even just listing that it's like that's that's already a lot um so i can see why it feels disjointed I also think the number of NPCs is problematic

you know Philip Pullman does say that he likes to read like a butterfly and write like a bee but I think maybe he's like read hang on let me work out how to say this written like a butterfly read like an RPG write like a bee I don't know there's something there's

something going on there um so yeah i'm hoping that the third book feels more comfortable and um yeah it gets concluded but also i really respect that he's made that challenging for us basically as readers because i've also ultimately found it a very rewarding book to read yeah uh yeah I won't repeat everything I agree basically uh yeah too slightly too convoluted and I want him to get away from the LSD trips uh the belt of urge and secret commonwealth just had slightly too much of this like wacky um myth world fairy where you're not even certain what's happening or if it's real I enjoy those bits I don't know i'd like a little bit more of okay we know what's fucking happening bears fighting you know armored horses with nets that kind of let's let's get back let's get back to the good old days of the amber spyglass um yeah i don't know it it was it was a book i i read it

i would give it a six out of 10. It's fine. But I agree with Faye that it was probably my least favorite of the books he's written so far. I'm just hopeful for the final one because I think there's a lot of potential. Yeah, I'm hopeful. But there's a lot of work for him to do. But he must be aware of that. So, yeah. I'm sort of optimistic, I i would say for the last book yeah i think the fact that he's introduced a lot of these themes very subtly

so to speak and peppered them in help uh just even reading like the lantern slides made me feel a little more confident so i think there's really something for that fingers crossed that this this last book but again like you're saying the last book shouldn't have to make the second book good the second book should be good and then you should read the last book be like wow what a great trilogy yeah i trust you philip i'm gonna trust i'm just gonna trust and hope that it comes out well yes so we'll see well thank you guys so much for joining me today i was gonna say us but here i am single alone thank you for having us it's been great this has been so fun yeah excellent really good talk to you definitely yeah thank you for

organizing let's do this more yes yes absolutely, we will all hear from each other soon. Hopefully we'll jump on with each other on other episodes. And we'll have to do a post-mortem when the next book comes out. I'm sure there will be a nice group DM of all of us going, oh my God, I can't believe that you were wrong and that Malcolm and Lyra are married with 18 children. They all have Pine Martin demons. So let's hope not for that outcome uh faye please tell us what where we can find her dark materials again so that we can make sure everybody checks you guys out

sure so we are on twitter facebook and instagram at hdmpod uh as I said at the top, I'm usually joined by my partner in crime and other half, Rach. She wanted for me to say hi to you all. And she's sorry that she can't be here. But yeah, you can find us doing lots of tweets and Instagram stories and stuff over there. And if you want to subscribe to our Patreon, you can at patreon.com forward slash hdmpod.

Thank you. Yes. Make sure you subscribe and check out some of the awesome art that Rach's been doing. I am very impressed with it. Ian, Amy, please tell us where we can find you guys on the internet. Yeah, sure. So we're on Twitter at Dark Material

Pods and Instagram and Facebook at The Dark Material Podcast. Our Patreon is patreon.com slash darkmaterialpodcast. And we put all sorts of stuff on all of those various bits and pieces, including some of Amy's artwork as well. We also have our own website, darkmaterialpodcast.com. So you can find us anywhere there. If anyone wants to email us directly as well um we're at the dark material podcast at gmail.com so anyone who desperately wants to tell us how wrong we are please feel

free to to get in touch um yeah oh i'm just gonna jump in off the back of ian and and say the exact same thing i would love to well i couldn't speak for myself because rachel hasn't read the book so i'll probably have to hide the emails from her. You can email us too at hair.materialspod at gmail.com. I would love to know your thoughts. Absolutely. And all of our fans do know that if they do email you, they will be on their best behavior.

Warren, Lo, I'm looking at you too. No, I'm just kidding. But we have some awesome fans, especially patrons and friends here that keep sending us great emails with some great critical thinking questions that keep me sharp. So shout out to them. As always, you guys, this has been Chloe with Girls Gone Canon. Eliana could not join us. She is on a two week off podcast binge from us. So she is out and exploring. Hopefully she finds her demon while she's gone

you can find us on your favorite podcast streaming platform like apple podcasts google play spotify acast stitcher be sure to check out our patreon at patreon.com slash girls gone canon where five dollar and up members get a new special his dark materialsials episode every other month, and A Song of Ice and Fire gets an episode every other other month. Bye guys, thanks so much again for joining us.