I bring up Sagan because he kept popping into my head while I was reading this. For all his accomplishments as an astronomer, Sagan's lasting legacy is in his outreach to the world. (There's a minor trope in science fiction where writers almost always depict people of the future remembering Sagan as a philosopher rather than a scientist.) There's a criticism of skeptics and rationalists that they take the wonder out of everything. Sagan was the opposite - he found wonder in everything. Pullman is, famously, atheist, and His Dark Materials wasn't subtle in its attacks on organized religion. But this book absolutely filled me with a sense of wonder and mystery - hence the Sagan comparison. This book picks up some 20 years after La Belle Sauvage, and maybe 8 years or so after His Dark Materials. Li'l Baby Lyra is now Undergraduate Lyra, and is going through an Ayn Rand phase (no, I'm not kidding - she's super into a popular book that "makes a virtue of selfishness" and rejects the notion of anything having a deeper meaning). Pantalaimon, being a sensible pine marten, doesn't like how her adulation of this book is affecting how she thinks, and they have been quarreling and growing ever more distant.
I wasn't expecting Lyra, post-HDM, to have any kind of a "happily ever after" with Will - the ending of The Amber Spyglass was pretty clear that wasn't going to happen. And it hasn't. But what I wasn't expecting was the friction between her and Pantalaimon. That's a relationship where I was assuming "happily ever after" without even realizing I was doing so, but she hurt him as deeply as it is possible to hurt a dæmon when she left him behind to go to the world of the dead. Turns out that kind of hurt can't be fixed easily, and that strongly colors her relationship with Pan. And since Pan and Lyra can separate, their relationship is tenuous in a way that most people don't have to deal with.
La Belle Sauvage was, in a total surprise to me, a fairy-story as much as anything else. It worked, and if you'd asked me ahead of time about Pullman writing a fairy-story I wouldn't have believed it for a second - HDM was so very clearly NOT a fairy-story. The Secret Commonwealth splits the difference between the two, and it works beautifully. Malcolm (now a professor at Oxford, and an agent of Oakley Street) is a major character. Alice is as well - she's the housekeeper at Jordan College and did a lot of the work raising Lyra (I'm assuming we actually saw her in HDM, but it's been long enough I don't recall.) The burning question for many of you, I'm sure, is, "What about Will?" Well, dear readers, I don't think the following is really a spoiler, but Will does not appear in person, and there's never a hint that he's about to. His presence is very strong throughout the book, though. Lyra never really moved on from him, and has been much lonelier than she's ever been willing to admit as a result.
The Catholic Church Magesterium is still the bad guys, and there's a bit of mustache-twirling Evil from that corner of things. And the book ends on more of a cliffhanger than I prefer, but I hate cliffhangers with a passion so take that for what it's worth. But even with those criticisms, this book is an easy 5 stars.
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