A Tale of Two Sequels

There were two sequels that I looked forward to reading:

• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and

• The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman, part two of the La Belle Sauvage trilogy that follows on from the His Dark Materials trilogy.

[SPOILER WARNING]

I enjoyed The Testaments. I know there are reviews criticising it for being too straight-forward and providing a happy ending. Sure, it’s not as complex as The Handmaid’s Tale, but after the grimness of the original book and the television show (which keeps stretching June’s misery on and on), I appreciate the closure The Testaments provided.

If there’s one thing I didn’t like, it was how all the characters were interconnected. It felt like an unnecessary literary device. I would have been satisfied knowing that the dominoes were in place for Gilead to fall. I didn’t need to know that it was specifically June’s daughters who orchestrated the fall, and that June herself was safe with Mayday. Nice to know Aunt Lydia’s backstory though.

I didn’t find The Secret Commonwealth to be terrible, but it definitely felt clunky and contrived. I suspect that Philip Pullman felt the pressure of delivering something as epic as His Dark Materials and that affected his storytelling. Lyra is now grown up and finds herself with pesky adult traits like scepticism and an interest in philosophy. Her daemon Pantalaimon has held onto his faith in the spiritual, and the two have grown in different directions.

There’s something unpleasantly preachy lying under all the prose. It reminds me of Susan Pevensie’s storyline in The Chronicles of Narnia. As time passes in the books, Susan ages, obtains an interest in looking attractive and stops believing in Narnia. Her siblings treat her growth with disdain, because there’s clearly no value in fitting in with the crowd and it is obviously a failing to develop in the direction that society expects. And if Aslan is a stand in for Jesus, poor Susan has lost her way.

Poor Susan to be judged in this way.

There’s a passage in The Secret Commonwealth where Pantalaimon speaks with a philosopher about his book The Hyperchorasmians, which Pan believes corrupted Lyra.

“Everything is what it is and nothing else,” said Brande.

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

Brande remained completely still. In the gloom he looked like an abandoned sculpture after a museum had been ransacked.

“Do you believe in that?”

“What does it matter what anyone believes? The facts are indifferent to belief.”

“You imagined the story of The Hyperchorasmians.”

“I constructed it from first principles. I built a narrative to show the logical outcome of superstition and stupidity. Every passage in the book was composed impersonally and rationally, and in a state of full awareness, not in some morbid dreamland.”

What do you call something that describes itself? The book is autologic.

Both Lyra and Pan take a trip in different directions and on their respective journeys, they make multiple stops in various cities. In each city, they meet someone important and learn something new. It feels like their journey is predetermined, and everything else is just prose to fill in the gaps.

Planning out your story’s plot is not a bad thing. I remember reading an interview with one of my favourite authors (was it Odo Hirsch maybe?) and they said that they planned out their novel’s entire storyline before sitting down to write.

Planning out the structure only becomes a bad thing when the structure itself is unbelievable.

La Belle Sauvage, the first book of the trilogy was much more enjoyable. I think it’s because it follows a different kid, Malcolm Polstead, and doesn’t feel the need to align closely with the original storyline of His Dark Materials. It does it’s own thing and it does it well.

If you like the idea of following a group of kids on a boat down a river and having supernatural encounters, you will also like The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones.