Girls Gone Canon Cast - The book of Dust Episode 9 - La Belle Sauvage Chapters 23-25 featuring Holly (of The Dust podcast)

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

At long last, La Belle Sauvage comes to the end of its perilous journey, but not before a few obstacles. Holly from The Dust podcast helps us steer this story to its end and deliver Lyra to sanctuary.   CHAPTER 23 - ANCIENTRY CHAPTER 24 - MAUSOLEUM CHAPTER 25 - A QUIET RODE   Where to find Holly Holly's twitter: https://twitter.com/HuntPants The Dust: A His Dark Materials Podcast — https://twitter.com/thedustpodcast Lilibet Podcast (covering The Crown) — https://twitter.com/LilibetPod Lilibet Podcast site — https://lilibetpod.wordpress.com/ Links mentioned Old Father Thames song — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_60TCnfSlIw   ----- 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 Intro by Alexander Nakarada

Hello everyone and welcome to Girls Gone Canon Reads the Books of Dust, Episode 9, La Belle Sauvage, Chapters 23-25, featuring a special guest, Holly from the Dust Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Eliana. And I am another one of your hosts, Chloe. Yes, hello, Holly. Thank you so much for joining us for our final La Belle Sauvage episode. Thank you so much for having me back on. We had a really good time when we did this last time. So this was super exciting for me to be able to come back and join you guys. Yes, we had a really fun time back in December for our Patreon episode. It was on the music from His Dark Materials series 1 and Series 2, the wonderful adaptation that's been premiering on HBO and BBC. Great production, and it was really fun having you and the double M on with us,

Matt on with us for that time, and now we have you back. This is really exciting. Some fun fact about this book and me, I read this book in 2017 when it came out. That was about a year after I experienced my own hundred year flood down here in South Louisiana. So there's a lot of parts of this book that are really traumatic for me. And for a lot of us down here, there was a time before the flood and the time after the flood.

But it was pretty intense. Not as intense as what goes on in this book. But I lost like a lot of most of my stuff and my parents home was pretty destroyed. They had to like do like a full remodel and it was a really traumatic experience. So so this book brings back some fun memories for me. Oh, my God. Wow. Yes.

I didn't know that. Yeah. And I mean, I didn't even read it the first time through. I kind of transitioned to audio only with books in the last few years. So my first time reading it was listening to it. And I gotta say, I'm a really big fan of Michael Sheen's performance, reading this book, and he does the Secret Commonwealth as well. So I think a lot of my notes and things I'm going to add are going to talk about like how he performs things. And it's fun. If y'all haven't listened to it yet, I definitely recommend it. He's fantastic. If you don't know who Michael Sheen is, I know him from Masters of Sex on from Showtime, which is a great

show. And he was recently in a adaptation of Good Omens with David Tennant, which is fantastic. And I think we were talking about Twilight before. I believe he's in the Twilight movies. Yeah. So, yeah. I've just seen clips. I was like, oh, look, there he is.

But he's a fantastic actor and really, really great narrator for this series. And I'm a big fan of anything that he'll read now yes i mean i'm a huge underworld fan so i love him very much i love him very forgot about underworld i really liked him in good omen yeah that was a good show adorable oh he is he's very like i think like he has the right whimsy for this book i've listened to a little bit of it but i i don't have a great attention span for audiobooks i get lost i gotta work on that i just get lost you know i'm like shit what happened well we do have to do our spoiler warning up top before we get into the episode

we will be spoiling from the main trilogy the northern lights or the golden compass if you're in the u.s like us the subtle knife the amber spy or the Golden Compass if you're in the US like us, the Subtle Knife, the Amber Spyglass, as well as talking about some of the novellas from time to time. And we will probably reference the TV series, series one and series two of His Dark Materials. Yes, we will not be discussing the secret Commonwealth until afterwards in the discussion. But also something else that we'd like to bring up for this specific episode is we do have a trigger warning in this episode for sexual assault and sexual violence. So if that is something that you don't wish to hear about, you can either skip the last two chapters of this episode or feel free to just, you know, not listen.

We love you and we'll see you again when we come back with some other his dark materials stuff and we will also remind you before we speak about it in the episode as well so if you want to tune in for a bit and then tune out that's fine as well this is of course our last labelle savage episode well i guess for now you never know maybe someday we'll come back and say, oh, I want to talk about that boat book again. But this is it for now. We will finish up the episode,

finish up the book, and I think we're going to be starting the Amber Spyglass next, to our knowledge. That's our next goal, our next destination. So a little rewind, then a bit of a fast forward. Yeah, it's going to be yeah actually it literally is that so i'm excited to get into the amber spy gloss and hopefully you know we are

doing it and finish it before our series three starts that's that's the hope which has in fact started production there are scripts ready made oh my god they're real they're real i've seen a photo of the the front of them right uh mary malone's actress simone kirby posted a photo of her script amazing yeah so that's a great look ahead eliana and i mean we will probably what we'll cover the secret commonwealth eventually but that's that's far off in the future. We've got Amber Spyglass and Series 3, hopefully. Yeah, but before we do that, we do have this end of the book, right? Not Series 3, but Chapter 23 of La Belle Sauvage.

Ancient 3. It's actually Ancient Tree, but I thought I can make this really work. It's the worst. Yes, Chapter 23, Ancient Re. Alice and Malcolm are stuck in front of giant iron gates with no way to get through that they can see. Just bushes, water weeds, and you. The tunnel is so sensory overload, there's dark water dripping and trickling, and the river is going through the gates, but also vegetation. It's very abundant.

It's very creepy crawly. Just bushes, water weeds, and me. No, it's you, trees. Why are you? But I don't have the quote here, but I encourage you all to reread this first two paragraphs of this chapter because I love the language here about how it talks about the darkness. And the darkness almost has this weight. It's heavy. They describe it almost like as being like this positive entity as opposed to the negative space, which makes me think a little bit of how artistic composition works, right? You use the negative space to sort of balance out the images and also, you know, focus on certain areas and to delineate things within your composition. But of course, this idea of darkness being this physical thing and not just the absence of light, it's reminiscent of dark matter, right?

Which is, of course, one of the big inspirations behind Dust, which is a big part of this whole series. Yeah, Dark Matter feels really present throughout all of this, doesn't it? And especially because they have the creepy crawlies bad right now. Because Bonvi's following them. Gerard Bonvi, back from the dead for like the 80th time in this book, is following them. And they're kind of worried that he is on the way to get them stuck at this gate but they don't actually hear him suddenly they're like what where wait a second where are we so where they are is a very strange place the river

is flowing against them therefore it should be beneath them however However, they are also up high, above. They feel like they're very high in the air. It's very nonsensical. Everything is confusing, weird, feels very magical. And Malcolm leans up to kind of survey where they are. And he sees something that knocks him backwards and makes Alice cry out. He points. It was the head of a man, but huge, emerging from the water among the reeds.

He must have been a giant. His hair was tangled up with weeds and seemed to be growing through a rusty crown. His skin was greenish and his long beard trailed over his throat and down into the water. He was looking at them with mild and peaceful interest. As he stood up higher, they saw his left hand was clasping the shaft of, what was it? A spear? No, a trident as malcolm saw by looking upwards into the darkness where three points of reflected light shone dimly he looked at the giant's face and thought he could see a glimmer of benevolence there uh i love it it's almost described like a storm surge barrier where they are but like in the sky but also underground it's very strange and i love this description of the giant

where they are on these islands they keep going kind of popping between and where the rushes have taken them it's almost like little bubble worlds right each place that they've been and it feels like they're slipping in and out of bubble worlds along their journey it's only perfect that we have a gatekeeper to a secret world here. We've been brought up river sticks a few times throughout the story and some elements of that mythos that are really resonant across ancientry here and in Mausoleum and A Quiet Road. The idea of the coin placed in the mouth of a dead person to grant passage to the underworld even feels pretty prominent, especially with bartering with Lyra as the princess of Albion,

as we're about to discover and discuss. It's interesting. It's kind of like a fake out, right? Because at first you have this sort of horrific imagery of the way that the giant's head looks as it's appearing. And you're like, oh, damn, it's another dead body. And then it's a giant. And he's like literally the biggest himbo.

And he smells like mud. I love it. He does, you're right. The himbo of the sea. Well, Malcolm asks this giant man, the giant himbo, if he'll let them through because they're being chased by a bad guy. But the giant man says he can't. The gates haven't been opened in thousands of years and they're only for use in bad guy but the giant man says he can't the gates haven't been opened in thousands of years and they're only for use in case of a drought in the world

but malcolm pleads that it would only be for a couple of seconds but the man's like i can't take that chance because how much water might come through the gates and malcolm responds that well the flood can't get any worse and also we have a baby and alice interjects that she's princess lyra and malcolm adds that they're taking her to the king of albion her father thinking of the fairy queen bravo right you have to give the kids credit on this one they both were real fast on their feet and you do get the sense here from this wonderful watcher in the water that he's not very bright to to the modern things going on with malcolm and, right? Like they're a little tricky. They're smart. They have that wit kind of like you see Lyra have with her trickery

in the main series. And I do love that watcher in the water aspect of the giant. Eliana and I have talked endlessly in our other series, A Song of Ice and fire read through that we are not tolkien uh super fans right like we don't know much about the worlds of lord of the rings but i do know that there is a watcher in the water in moria and lord of the rings in middle earth and it's a little different of a story it's not as uh not as himbo-esque right the watcher in the water in moria is more of a creature a lot of these stories of these gatekeepers are like monsters in the water in Moria is more of a creature. A lot of these stories of these gatekeepers are like monsters in the water, but this giant seems so nice, so friendly. And of course, the password to the gate ends up being the princess of Albion, right? Albion of old magic and old blood, a literal different world.

We'll talk a little bit more about Albion, but it was a landmass that constituted the island known as Great Britain. And once it was said to be united in an age of peace during which all of its inhabitants followed the old religion as one people. Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, this for me was like if they merge the Titan of Braavos with the Weirwood door, and then you have three people trying to make their way past like pass through and they have to whisper the right password to the being to be allowed through and I don't know

that's kind of what it reminded me of the sphinx yes that's even better but it is very much you know dependent as you were saying of like finding the right words these magic words and it's funny that they spin it out of thin air right, it's not

any sort of open sesame. They're just like, I don't know, here, hold the baby. Hold the babby. Yeah, actually, he does say babby. And I was like, what? How is babby formed? And I just am like, oh, so the titan,

sorry, the giant is into memes. He's tuned in that's what he's doing in the other side of the world he's like on the internet but yeah the giant shrugs acknowledging that he's like oh yeah i know albion he says he can't open the gates though because he has instructions from father thames himself and you know we talked about about Albion a bit last time, but digging into it a bit more and coming back to it again, as we said, it's an alternate name for Great Britain. And interestingly, thinking about the word Albion and that name, one Celtic linguist, Xavier de la Mare.

Oh. I'm going gonna let that pew pew pew that one's a little we can't talk about it too much here but that's dusty that is dusty you're dusty I know wow and of course

we are here on the water so a lot of things going on anyways Xavier Delamare which I find that significance because it's the means of the sea anyways um said that the etymology of albion could have been in reference to like the world above the visible world in opposition to the world below i.e the underworld so it's fascinating that this gatekeeping enormous himbo makes reference to father Thames.

We begin to see that the flood is, of course, still a flood, but suddenly it becomes a river, right? And rivers, of course, have many meanings, as do floods. A lot of the symbolism behind floods has to do with cleansing, right? But also, of course, consuming, right? It takes all these things. It swallows it all up in the water. Whereas rivers are also very much about destiny, right? There's a course to them, there's a destination. But it's of course also tied to ideas of the underworld. Chloe, you were talking about the underworld and crossing the river Styx and needing that coin. And of course we do see that with Lyra and Will, when they're crossing to the underworld,

and they have to separate from their demons, which Malcolm has to do here in a bit. And rivers are thresholds, as Malcolm and Alice, they're exiting the world below, that subterranean world where the fairies live, back into the world above, that visible world. And of course Malcolm and Alice are at a threshold,

they're at a crossing in their own lives uh it's called puberty and they begin to wrestle with more complex questions about and doubts about the world and of course as we've come to see in these past few chapters malcolm's burgeoning sexuality which this is not this is not how i would have found my sexual awakening but this is a story that we have but also perhaps the flood is a sea right coming back to that delamari thing some suggest that albion may be a word derived from the word albus which now i'm like oh that's that other thing okay anyways and that the word albus that means white might have been inspired then by the white cliffs of dover in britain and it reminds me of the poem dover beach by matthew arnold which i actually don't doubt i'm pretty sure phil pullman knows this it's a very famous poem and

he's very into poetry and the poem it's you know a lot of it has to do with like that beach. It's very full of sadness. It talks about the classical, references classical mythology, also in a way threshold, right, of modernity seeming to give way to a world with less faith, where people have less trust in religion. And that's, of course, very central to these books. There's also a call at the end to be true to one another for love, seeing the world briefly as new and full of possibilities, while there are armies that are clashing at night unseen. And those are likely much more metaphorical in the poem. But of course, that's very much what's happening in these last three chapters.

Very explicitly, right? Very, very literally. They're transitioning into a new world um the metaphor right on the doorsteps of adulthood but unbeknownst to them but also kind of notes otherwise they wouldn't have gone on this enormous journey um as the last chapter opens there are those two secret forces fighting to secure lyra and her future and of course there's that like other big secret war in the main trilogy it's doing a lot to set up those tensions and uh two secret forces fighting for lyra's future one thing but i think we're about to meet a few more right as we go along in this story in these last few chapters not even just just two. There's a whole

supernatural world out there. A whole new world. But there's also a force right now that's still trying to bring Lyra down, and Malcolm and Alice both hear the very creepy hyena's laughter. Not great.

Does not do great for your anxiety, right? Malcolm continues trying to sweet talk the giant and he's like you know you're probably not strong enough to open that gate anyway i know you guys have already mentioned the hyena laughing before on a previous podcast but it really does add to that element of anxiety horror and suspense throughout and michael sheen's performance of this is really great it's like haha it's like that and oh i can't it's hard sorry listeners for that awfulness but it is the way he does it is both jarring and and creepy yeah so when you're listening to it it's like a quiet moment

and then you hear that and we're like oh god it just it shakes you i think what's like the worst too is imagining that they're on the water right so it echoes no matter what that laugh is going to echo and sound like it surrounds sound everywhere on the water and like dissipate very slowly and that i just remember reading it i actually read this uh on the way to and from eliana's home and so i was on a bus reading it and like i was so glued in i got about halfway through the book on the way there or like more than halfway and the whole time i was at her house i was just like i gotta go finish this book i don't want to talk to you i don't want to be talking to you because i was like so in suspense from that freaking hyena god damn hyena yeah he knows how to write the creepy stuff for sure and as you said like the

sounds so you can't really tell where they are and that makes it so much more eerie because you don't know where they're coming from how to defend yourself and also now i want to hear how michael sheen does the hyena because it's not easy you know like i tried to do it i looked up how hyenas sound it's not easy no and hyenas i have a list of hyena effects too but they have different sounds. They make for different reasons. So, and I don't know what all of them mean, but hyenas are kind of misunderstood. And they're not like, I mean, they're actually really, really intelligent creatures. And they can solve puzzles that they weren't even like trained for.

And they're better at chimpanzees than at like cooperative problem solving. They are actually a little bit smarter than chimpanzees, according to some research. And another thing they'll do is if, you know, they're pack animals, but if they find another hyena, if a mother hyena like finds her babies being bullied by other hyenas, she'll make like a false alarm predator call. Like, oh, and she'll like pretend that there's a predator coming to distract the hyenas so she can the other hyenas that are bullying their baby so she can protect them i'm like that's pretty that's pretty awesome so they do have a lot of different vocal sounds they make that mean different things and in the way they communicate that's really neat i do feel like they get a bad rep in this story you know like i think Pullman really is playing on the mean stuff. And obviously, this hyena is different.

Right? Like, Gerard Bonvy is not like other guys. He's different. Why do all the bad demons have no names? Oh, you're right. We don't know the hyena's name. I never even thought about that. I haven't noticed that.

It's so unfair. If it was a Pokemon, its name would be haha or he he right but yeah i think that's great like what you said and it really goes to show all the different faces right that gerard bon vie has the different ways that he performs in front of you know different people and and to get what he wants but as you said the hanging is getting a bad rap you know you you have one lion king movie and after that like that's all anyone sees yeah they're kind of misunderstood like vultures they are scavengers but the great thing about scavengers is they clean up their environment you know they eat the carcasses that could spread diseases but actually uh they're they are hunters too and i think in some cases the lions actually steal from hyenas

rather than the other way around so yeah lying the lion king taught us all wrong for sure real screwy and pullman is not helping. No. Justice for hyenas. Except this one. Yeah. Even this one. I mean, nature versus nurture. I'm just saying.

Listen. You're right. Demon nature versus nurture. Bongbi really messed that demon up. Malcolm asks the giant what could make him open these gates. And the's like orders so malcolm pulls out his rucksack well bonvi's rucksack and he says i have orders a passport of sort from the king's ambassador in oxford he holds up the mathematical formula written paperwork and the giant examines it turns it upside down right side left all the way around for a few minutes before saying you know this is undeniable i can't argue with it these are papers

i'm not sure if this was meant to be funny but i thought it was really funny oh yeah pretending like he can read but what he says is probably true he's looking at math you know so it's probably correct and and i like how he just interprets this it's looking at math you know so it's probably correct and and i like how he just interprets this it's it's undeniable you know he can't argue with it the king of it's not saying what he thinks it says but it's probably still correct whatever it is on that paper uh and malcolm gets like that whiff of him it smells like mud fish weeds they're so close they're like please just let me through and the giant's like can i hold the princess and he's like i see she's a princess i could obviously just see her majesty from looking at her so they're like all right malcolm puts her in his

enormous palm and lyra gazes at the giant while pan sings like a nightingale it all like really works out you know they were like i trust i trust this enormous man and they were right too this enormous mud right absolutely and he kisses his forefinger then touches it to lyra's head feels like a blessing of some sort i don't know what it means then he hands her deliberately back he promises to let them through and not to let anyone without the orders through. And before they go, Malcolm asks, wait, what was the garden that was back there? And the giant tells them, that's the place where people go when they forget.

The fog is hiding everything they ought to remember. If it cleared away, they'd have to take stock of their selves. They wouldn't be able to stay in the garden no more and i will say that you know speaking of the underworld that does remind me a little bit of the rivers of nemesine and i forgot the other one but the other one's about forgetting nemesine is about remembering memories but so a little bit like that there's a lot of mythos in there that i do want to circle back to in a little bit for sure yeah and they back off to give the giant some room and the giant six is trident in the bank before sinking back below malcolm drives them through and they hear the distant laughter die off as the gate closes back up.

Five minutes later, they've paddled through the pitch dark and they finally come through the tunnel to open air. Alice finally points out what's been killing her, that they went down into the tunnel, so they should have had to come up to get out of the tunnel, but they're on the same level, just like

with the maze right at the aisle earlier. And who was that man thing malcolm's like i think that's the god of the tributary father tem he's the god of the main river he remembers george boatwright saying he had met father tems and alice prides him on remembering what the fairy woman said yeah so i'm not sure I was able to figure out which river this one might be, but I want to let everyone know, you know, there's a lot to say about Old Father Thames and the Thames, right, of course,

as this magical river. People have talked about it, but I just want to point out there's a song from 1933 called Old Father Thames. I'm not going to sing it for all of you. I recommend you all look it up. I didn't absorb the melody enough, but it's

a fun, jaunty song. We'll have to drop the link in the description, and maybe if we ever revisit La Belle Sauvage someday, we'll get Eliana to karaoke it. I could do it, I guess. I'm not going to make you. it could be fun someday someday you know it's it seems like a good it seems like a good drinking song you know

if one day we all find ourselves at a bar together or something we could all bust it out yeah is it like a sea shanty it feels a little bit like that to me but also i'm sure if I actually said it was, people would tell me I was wrong. Yeah. I'm not a sea shanty expert. There was that time, right, like recently on the internet, sea shanties were really in. Yeah, TikTok.

The old TikTok did it. Well, they paddle under the moon and Alice falls asleep. Malice sees an island ahead with no grass trees or buildings and floats towards it, thinking of tying up, although it's quite exposed. He moves the bell sauvage toward the shore and suddenly, anxiously remembers the resin in the boat and checks in a panic to see if it's still dry. A voice then comes, which scares the shit out of him, saying that it's safe. And then appears a woman about the age of lyra's mother wearing a flower crown with long black hair and black ribbons of silk staring at them she looks like she'd expected them but also

she has no demon just a branch of pine and malcolm's like is that her demon this is so funny oh my god earth i laughed a lot i laughed so much when i read that like thinking of i don't know like a stick just someone be like so that's yeah that's what i was thinking stick stickly or something uh it reminds me of the wonder twins the wonder twins and they're like form of a bucket of water like that's my demon form of a board a fucking piece of wood plank from ed ed and eddie ed and eddie yep jimmy and plank oh god whoa i think you unlocked uh like a a core memory when you said stick stickly just now his voice is like this I don't know that's the demon's voice imagine

okay well she introduces herself as queen of the Onega region which is Tilda Vassara she's like he's like where did you come from she's like I came from the sky and I'm like wow she really gave that answer huh she just told him I came from the sky. And I'm like, wow, she really gave that answer, huh?

She just told him I came from the sky. And so rude. Near the canoe, a white bird whispers to Alice's demon. And he's like, oh, wait. So that's her demon. But why is she all the way over there? What was she whispering? I could see ahead of the notes but

maybe it was just a sleeping spell i don't know but i was like what what is she what is she telling them what's going on and we don't find out it's true yeah so i kind of thought it was just like you know how that happens in all the books that whenever a witch shows up her demon will always be like hey yo i'm gonna come talk to you little demons and tell you what's up while my person speaks to your person i think that's just what was happening but now i kind of want to know yeah well yeah but i don't know the fact that she was speaking to ben and not asta i was like alice is sleeping like what i don't know and then she wakes up not knowing not seemingly knowing or maybe she does i don't know you know then she wakes up not knowing, not seemingly knowing, or maybe she does. I don't know. You know, honestly,

we should ask Philip Pullman to clarify, you know, if Alice has any thoughts. I think Alice might have some thoughts that she could tell us. On what happened to her, yeah. I will say, it turns out the Onega region, just like the Laganara

region, is also real. This one, though, is in Russia, and that's it. That's all I have for you. Well, it's funny you say that, because, like, Tilda, the name is Germanic, actually. I was wondering if it was gonna be something closer, but it's Germanic. I didn't see anything for her last name, but also it's a short form of Matilda. Huh. I didn't know that. And short for warrior and battle strength.

Well, that seems right for a witch. Yeah, for Tilda Vassara of the Onega region. Well, Tilda says that Alice and Ben and Lyra will sleep now for the rest of the night, and the people passing on the CCD light behind them will not be able to see their group for the rest of the night, and the people passing on the CCD light behind them will not be able to

see their group for the evening. Malcolm fights the urge to hide from the light that suddenly appears, casting over from them from the CCD search boat, but miraculously, they don't see them. Tilda explains witches can make themselves invisible, with vision sliding over them and things nearby. The island will be safe malcolm explains that those people want to capture the baby maybe even kill her tilda asks if alice is her mother and malcolm explains they're taking her to her father in london so of course along with you know seeing a witch in general we get that call back to the main series to will and seraphina with the magic that makes themselves invisible with will it isn't magic but because it's not magic that

almost makes it more magical but so quick quick reminder of the mechanics of this world and their magic malcolm asks what her demon is and she explains all which demons are birds and hers is an arctic tern he asks what she's doing here so far from the north and she says that oh she was looking for something and now that she's found it she'll go home not mysterious at all from the sky okay he thanks her for hiding them and examines her expression in the moonlight indescribably ancient ah like the title of the chapter maybe like the giant in the water but somehow young she looks calm but also merciless tilda is just as curious about this weird little boy too and she stares at

him as well and they both feel for just a moment as if they have perfect openness as if no secrets existed between them then she springs into the air and off they both go but there were secrets between them because she told them she was from the sky is it just me or is malcolm way too trusting of these supernatural beings after they're running with the fairy I mean like he's not wrong in these last two cases with River Hembo and you know obviously the witch that's clearly looking to make sure Lyra's okay but still you think he would have maybe learned something I don't know it is interesting that like with the fairy he was like what do you mean you fly you have a flying

ship a gyroptor you know a zeppelin uh but now he's like oh this all makes sense i get it now he just accepts it i don't know i guess if i was as tired uh from rowing as malcolm was i'd probably be in the same situation but that boy is gonna have biceps you know you'd think that is that kid's gonna have some guns some arm day happening there arm week sucka yeah they keep eating the fairy food as i'm sure we'll get to and hanging out with witches malcolm's just like really blase about it all yeah but i do appreciate tilda is very much so you know coming to witness and beholding the child of the prophecy and all that jazz here definitely touching uh especially because they finally get to sleep that that's pretty big you know i think that's a big one i want that for them

sleeping yeah lyra got a lot of it in her series you know and it's only fitting it's only right malcolm crouches by the canoe pulling the blanket closer and on to alice and lyra and asks asta if she's tired they are both fucking exhausted the island is utterly bare like a part of the moon they sit on a rock watching the water flow past and talk about the witch malcolm liked her but doesn't think that they'll see her again asta wonders if what she'd been looking for was them and malcolm's like don't be silly she's a queen he gets sleepy and they go settle in the boat with the girls that night he dreamed of the wild dogs again his savage dogs with bloodstained muzzles and torn ears and broken teeth with wild eyes and slavering jaws and scarred flanks howling and barking as they raced around him Interesting. before he felt no fear he felt nothing but savage exhilaration and boundless delight

yeah interesting you know these dogs come back later uh raid is raid is malcolm does the old one too the old murder you know and like maybe this is more of a sidebar i don't really have any real feelings about it beyond like it's pretty edgelord phil it's pretty i mean is it or is it inspired by the baja man who did let the dogs out who who who who all right well glossing over the baja man himself, Philip Pullman, coming off of that island from last chapter and off of this meeting with the witch and with River Himbo, I do think that that island kind of symbolizes Avalon in many ways. Avalon is, of course, a magical island said to have existed off the coast of Britain and vanquished, just disappeared after some time. It was famous for its beautiful apples, much like some of the mythology we've discussed before on the golden fruit, and it's a part of a lot of different stories, especially in Arthurian stories.

In Celtic mythology, it's associated with the afterlife and is believed to exist outside of normal time. It was thought to be accessible by islands off of britain's coast the celts believed the islands were mystical gateways and referred to them as the isles of the dead avalon was an island similar kind of to the fields of elysium where crops would flourish people would live extraordinarily long lives of course morgan lefay was very strongly associated with the island it was her home home of the Celtic goddess, as well as the Lady of the Lake. And Tilda here, appearing on this island out of nowhere,

gleaming, shining, offering sleep and protection to these children, very much so feels like a Lady of the Lake character, or even Morgan Le Fay with the witchcraft reference, especially since she's appearing to the hero before he has to, you know, do the hero thing in the next chapter. That's interesting. The Lady of the Lake. We just met her. Tilda Vassara. Yeah. It is another

one of those, like, lakes. So, yeah, absolutely. I like that idea. And obviously, you know, I think that the Avalon call-out is a great reference because Pullman clearly has a lot of references, right, to a lot of different kinds of mythology throughout his stories and here, right, a lot of that British mythology. So I think that makes sense. And, you know, side note, the other author whose books we follow did once upon a time have an Avalon series that did not get finished.

once upon a time have an Avalon series that did not get finished. To the chagrin of one of my co-hosts in my other podcast, Spaced for Monthly, because I too am ancient. You know, you are. The chapter Ancientry, the biggest meta I want to provide you all is that it's about Eliana. No, I'm just kidding.

No, but it's funny you say that because there's also like, there's a series, the Mists of Avalon series, and the idea of the mist Mists of Avalon series. And the idea of the mist on the island Avalon is supposed to be clouding for forgetfulness, like you were speaking of the rivers and memory. Yeah, that's interesting, too. I do think they're related. And there's just so much fun lore and mythology and different stories that have kind of taken that Arthurian legend and play with it. taken that arthurian legend and play with it and it is definitely that idea of that missing british island you know that missing piece of magic that's been forced to disappear from modern eye and

modern culture so yeah that leads us to the that is the end that closes us out for ancientry so that takes us over to the mausoleum or as malcolm would say it mausoleum oh my god uh tired hungry cold and filthy yes filthy the trio is paddling their way over the water stopping to change lyra when they can but something else is following them just out of eyesight flickering beyond and they both notice it malcolm thinks it could be a night guest but it isn't dark quite yet alice is unhappy with his speculation she's like oh great a night guest she's sounding pretty bitter scornful and like the old alice he once knew this made me think of you chloe because i just kept thinking prisoner zero has escaped out of the corner of your eye it is it is suspenseful like sci-fi horror right a night gassed just behind you i love that though it's a perfect actor who referenced you'll get there

someday i'll get there someday i got to i guess that was only episode two, my bad, the skin. But I was like, oh, it's the meme. Moisturize me. Oh, that's so good. Well, man. Malcolm wants to talk to Asta, but knows they're all too close in the canoe to really discuss anything, so the landscape

changes as they work their way toward London, and devastating scenes emerge from the flood's destruction. At the head of it is an oratory, a tower lying on the ground, enormous bronze bells scattered beside it, and of course, the shadow followed them. Malcolm tries to catch the shadow by looking just suddenly to the left or right, but only sees the movement and left behind as the tries to they agreed wouldn't matter if it felt like a friendly shadow but it doesn't really feel friendly right now alice keeps an eye out from her better angle and she called out warnix a few times throughout their day a ccd vote for example that seemed to

follow them. The sky starts to rumble later in the afternoon, and they pull up the tarp to keep dry. As they make to pull it up, a searchlight catches their boat, and they realize if they don't hide quickly, they will be caught. The only place they can find to hide is a wooded hill with overgrown grass. Alice has a really bad feeling about this hill, but there's nowhere else, so they land and fix up the tarp hastily. Once the canopy is still, Alice holds Lyra, keeping her quiet, and Malcolm holds his breath. The searchlight shines through their canopy, and they stay still, hoping to blend in in the shadows. The searchlight swings away eventually. Alice lets out a breath, saying, I wish we'd gone somewhere else. And then she explains, this is a graveyard and it has one of those little houses people are buried in too.

And yes, that is when Malcolm realizes what it is, a mausoleum. He had seen the word though, never heard it, and he pronounced it to rhyme with linoleum. You know, mausoleum. I'll see why not. it works just as well it's just a reminder that sometimes people learn words by reading them and you should never judge pronunciations pronunciations are so regional to that's true talk about secret commonwealth just a slight bit you say olivier but i'm from south wisconsin where everything's got like a french twist on it so it's olivier uh but i'm from south wisconsin where everything's got like a french twist on it so it's olivier for me and but like no hate it's just we all say things different and i say bonneville because it makes chloe unhappy and listen i pronounce that canonically right it's bon vie

first of all eliana i've heard the author say it okay michael sheen says bonneville i know actually our discord has brought that up a few times amazing oh it's so good i feel pleased this has made my day it made me laugh i laughed um on the early episodes of this series on your podcast because that came up and i was and i was thinking the whole time i was like well michael sheen's been saying it incorrectly the whole book too and then you think about roy dotrice rip yeah um you know with a song of ice and fire i love it i'll never forget patire and brian there's like more leeway there you know for a song of ice and fire whereas you know some of these names, right, are kind of

more real-world-ish. But, yeah. Well, you know what? Malcolm doesn't like where we are. He doesn't like this mausoleum, and says we've gotta change Lyra quickly and try to leave as soon as possible.

And Alice is combative to his plans, reminding him that Lyra is a baby and they at least have to build a fire to get some hot water for her. But it's pretty obvious that something is pissing her off, but Malcolm avoids the confrontation, thinking of all the things he'd rather talk to her about, like the fog beyond the banks of the weird island

and the shadow that was following them. He wanted to tell her about the witch and ponder the meaning of the wild dogs and have her admire him for fixing the crack in the hull of LaBelle Sauvage. You have this line. He wanted her to

call him Mal. He wanted Lyra to feel warm and clean and happy and well-fed, but none of that was going to happen. It's kind of a bummer. It is a bummer is a bummer life sucks malcolm welcome to being an adult you cross that river homeskiller yeah you get dust on you and you're like shit i'm dirty life sucks the rest of your life it's not it's not all bad it's not all bad um it's just mostly bad i don't know The rain is beating so hard, Malcolm doesn't even notice Lyra's crying. Alice tends to her, being very patient, even though she's pretty cross with Malcolm for dragging them into all of this at this moment.

He thinks about running to find dry wood in the trees before it gets too wet out, and a crack of thunder beats down a distance away. The rain starts to slow a bit after that and malcolm edges out of the canopy everything is wet and smells like dank rot and vegetation and worms crawl to the top of the earth okay we get it it's a metaphor right like the worms in a graveyard and the mausoleum coming to the top bone v coming back from the dead like the worms you know to come ruin their goddamn day once more it's a metaphor i get it i like worms um i do too it's also like you know it's another way right i'm not saying that the fairies right or all the magical folk are worms right they're they're very majestic clearly but when it's damp right the worms come out from the earth.

You did say in the last episode too, like, they're being forced up with the water, right? People being forced from below. So this is that physical manifestation of that. Absolutely. But the worms are, like, happy about it, I guess. Then, like, afterwards it dries up, and then I like worms, you know, sometimes you pick them up and you

put them back in the grass. Yeah, you want them to have a good life. You can use the worms to go fishing. Oh, that's true. You could. Go fishing. Oh, I love it. Malcolm moves to get more wood and Alice tells him to not go too far and to keep out of sight. He has a hard time finding anything dry and thinks about burning Bonneville's notes.

Asta tells him not to think that, that they're important notes. He ends up taking a dozen fence posts that look dry enough and brings them to the front of the mausoleum. Asta says, they can't hurt us if they're dead, referring to the mausoleum. He breaks the padlock and in they go to the damp air. No smell of death, though. They just see rows of shelves and with coffins placed on them and perfectly dry wood. Malcolm apologizes to the skeleton in the first coffin who looked to be a woman and tells her that they'll give her another one later seeing the skeleton doesn't bother mal he'd seen worse and he was expecting it he thinks it must have been a woman noting her golden necklace and

two rings on the skeleton it does feel symbolic right because they've kind of been stealing and taking as they go not a dissimilar way to will and lyra right in the subtle knife and will who's such a good boy and is like we have to leave money lyra we can't just steal stuff it's not right malcolm is very apologetic right i think that's very very sweet they've been borrowing throughout their journey from people in places and after after this, even at the grocer, they do it again. This entire passage felt so reminiscent of Lyra, Roger, and the scholars in the Northern Lights, especially this part of it that I thought was very interesting. Once she tried to play a trick on some of the dead scholars by switching around the coins in their skulls so they were with the wrong demons. Pana Layman became so agitated at this, he changed into a bat and flew

up and down, uttering shrill cries, flapping his wings in her face. But she took no notice. It was too good a joke to waste. She paid for it later, though. In bed, in her narrow room at the top of the staircase, she was visited by a night guest and woke up screaming at the three robed figures who stood at the bedside pointing their bony fingers before throwing back their cowls to show bleeding stumps where their heads should have been. Only when Panna Layman became a lion and roared at them did they retreat, backing away into the substance of the wall until all that was visible was their arms. Then their horny, yellow-gray hands. Then their twitching fingers. Then nothing. First thing in the morning, she hastened down to the catacombs and restored the demon coins to their rightful places and whispered sorry, sorry to the skulls.

This is baby's first trip to the cemetery slash crypt. It is! I love this. I the cemetery slash crypt. It is. I love this. I thought this was cute. It is the perfect precursor, right? And she tempts fate. She plays with fate and tempts it when she does this trick because she's like, it's too good of a gag. Too big of a prank.

I can't sit out on it. But Malcolm acts super apologetic from the get-go, which could help their cause. Although Malcolm and Alice do have their own night guest right gerard bon vie so i don't know i think that's kind of an intentional parallel in the way bon vie has been following them like a shadow in the past few chapters true true and he's also very much kind of like a when i think about it he reminds me a little of the terminator right and that his ability to just keep following and and and that really does strike something right there's a reason that chase things like that are really anxiety inducing and effective for not just storytelling but in general because people are like humans part of the way we evolved

right is to be endurance runners we were hunters now i just hunt burritos actually no you know gather chips hunt burritos and but like we were a terrifying predator because other animals right they would get tired and we could just keep chasing after them endurance right um whereas a lot of them were just like sprints and stuff right and the idea of something else having more endurance than us and being able to chase us is i think it speaks to something really primal in humans how did you know what i ate for lunch today a burrito or chips it was the burrito tell us how you just the burrito did you uh slay it with a spear um i drove my car to to it and then um there was other cars also waiting for burritos so i did not wait with the cars and i went a different way and indoors

into the dining area and um natural selection at its finest for real i mean the burrito den and and picked one and left a gift in exchange uh for the other for the rest of the burritos you know i think you're gonna survive a lot more than the other burrito hunters holly i think you have what it takes absolutely you have the yeah you have it i had less time to to acquire and and consume my burrito than than the other burrito hunters today so i had to take a different take a different route it's a time of need you know for what it's worth we do have to hand it we've got a skeleton hand it to Malcolm he treats the skeleton very respectfully he actually

hides the skeleton's jewelry like they're jewels beneath the velvet that the skeleton lays on to discourage theft and apologizes again for taking her lid before splintering it up against the shelf kicking it, getting ready

to take it back. He closes up the mausoleum, puts the broken padlock down, and he glances around to go back to the canoe. He signals to Alice with the torch, but then he sees the shadow again. But now it's not a shadow, it's transformed and it's Bon Vie. He runs back to the boat, where Alice is singing a nursery rhyme to Lyra. He can't hide his fear and she sees it instantly but he tries to play it off as a mistake. He tells himself he imagined it because he hadn't seen the hyena so it's impossible that it's bon vie. They couldn't paddle away. This is the only land for Miles. Lyra needs food and warmth and the CCD boat is still on the move

looking for them just out there malcolm makes a fire lyra cries steadily while alice changes her and they have just enough wood to make lyra's milk when they're done malcolm kicks the ashes away and getting into the the water just sounds awful just sounds awful to him it does not sound fun it sounds horrible alice asks him if there's any candle left. He rummages, finds the remainder. It's only as long as his thumb, but they light it and Lyra sucks her thumb, looking into the flame. Alice whispers. She asks Malcolm what he saw. He says he thought it looked like him for a second, but then it was nothing. Nothing was there. Alice murmurs they should have been sure they should have done him in for good malcolm pipes up finally and is like what happens to someone's demon

when they die and alice responds they just vanish and then asta and ben are in the background like what the fuck you don't just talk about this shit this is cruel we are right here like this is so rude you don't just say these things in front is cruel we are right here like this is so rude you don't just say these things in front of demons but it's also themselves right they're again pondering those big questions and having a lot of these there's a lot of issues coming up for them right now and they have to make these really big decisions and so the mausoleum right it is a place that is dedicated to the death of this one very particularly important adult and and it's something that we associate in general right with the death of

adults someone who is important enough that they get this whole huge building but i think it's also of course this moment that's the death of malcolm's innocence i'm reluctant to say that it's the death of alice's because i don't want to think about it in terms of the things that happen in this chapter that we're going to talk about shortly but also I mean Alice has been forced into the role of a caretaker already for a while early on in her life much like Will was and sure like her demon hasn't settled yet but yeah I mean I guess this whole journey is though in many ways that for both of them yeah she is described i mean at the start of the story of being on the verge of her demon settling right

and it's interesting that he doesn't explore that for her much further he doesn't really add anything for alice as far as closure to that i do find that that interesting. We just know Ben eventually settles. I guess we kind of don't for Malcolm also. I remember one time you told me, and I was like, what the fuck? Then I realized I'd actually technically read it in the novella before, so it wasn't really a spoiler, but I felt a little spoiled. Yeah.

Well, you got over it. I got over it pretty fast. Did you die, though? My innocence. That was the death of my innocence in that moment. Alright, innocence experience. Take us away. Malcolm tries to figure all of this into the idea of a night gas where they can move around on their own, but they don't have any demons.

And Alice says, you never get a person without a demon though. It's impossible. where they can move around on their own, but they don't have any demons. And Alice says, you never get a person without a demon, though. It's impossible. And Ben is again like, shut up. Can't deal. And then they talk about it hurts too much when you try to pull them apart.

And then inside, they're also like, shut up, shut up, shut up. Malcolm says he's heard of places where people exist without demons, though. Maybe they're just dead bodies walking around. Asta becomes a terrier like Ben and they growl together at them terrified telling them to stop they're like what the fuck is wrong with our humans lyra begins to complain about the dog growling and alice sweet

talks her quite literally by pulling out a little piece of toast for lyra which we find out later on she only has a few teeth so like what's going on here? I guess they're desperate, right? And she's like, later on we're going to find you the tiny little quail egg that goes with that. I'm like, is this not a choking hazard? Anyway, Malcolm realizes that, oh, Alice stole this food from the

garden, and Alice says she'd actually stolen a bunch from the waiters because they didn't care. And she leans over to give him a spicy fish cake and malcolm thinks that maybe if they run out of milk they can just feed her this stuff more supernatural snackage happening uh that quail egg on toast sounds really good this scene made me hungry yeah really buttery really buttery and smooth it just so good. I bet it's so smooth. And like, again, like you mentioned, they're not shying away from the supernatural stuff, Holly, at all. They're in it to win it.

They're like, yeah, let's just feed this baby not just human food, but fairy food. Yeah, right. Are there consequences? Hmm. Also, speaking of people mispronouncing things, I think Alice also has a creative pronunciation right for canapes. It's spelled a little differently. And she tries to remember what they were called, I think.

That's cute. Yeah, I almost didn't notice that. That's really funny. Unless that is like, I don't know how some people spell it. But I thought that's what it was sort of indicating. Yeah, I think it's a sound in or doubt. Sometimes she does that, you know? Yeah.

Malcolm hears something from outside it's gerard bonvie and he's softly whispering alice alice freezes and malcolm freezes for a moment too looking for her reaction and regretting that because she looks terrified lyra munches her toast unaware of the danger but suddenly it's just the wind passing by outside the boat, just the lapping of water. The candle's flame starts to act weird, you know, like every horror suspense movie you've ever seen. It gives out light, but suddenly it has a shadow. The searchlight had returned. Alice gasps and stifles her gasp with her hand, and immediately moves it to stifle Lyra's eventual chatter. They both see and hear

the engine noise and the light beam, but the beam moves as the searchers are slowly nearing the graveyard and the water. Alice gives Lyra to Malcolm because she feels like she's going to faint, and Malcolm can see the light doesn't frighten her, but Gerard Bonvy does. He hears another whisper and feels desperate to help Alice, but she tells him to shut up and she covers her ears ben stands on his legs half on the gunwale half on her malcolm can't distinguish what the whispers are saying but he can hear them more distinctly as alice's expressions are changing over and over from disgust to horror to anguish all right everyone, and as we said up top at the beginning of this episode, we do have a trigger warning

for moments of sexual assault slash sexual violence, and we are coming upon that, so if that is something that you would rather not listen to, please feel free to tune out now, and again, thank you so much for listening to I mean, this book with us, right?

The Books of Dust, and we are going to come back and see you again with the amber spyglass yes if you are here still with us gerard has cut the tarp he's choking alice and searching for lyra feeling all over alice and ben is in his terrier form and biting Gerard, but then Gerard grabs Ben, ripping him from Alice, who scrambles after him. The hyena demon laughs and Pan flutters as a moth onto Lyra. Malcolm realizes he must go save Alice from being assaulted by Gerard Bonneville, but he can't make himself leave Lyra. Asta tells him to go, that she will watch Lyra, and he says that he can't, it'll hurt so much, and he kisses Lyra, and then holds and kisses puppy Asta to his face.

He separates from Asta, and he feels so much pain and regret and guilt. Asta turns into a little leopard cub, and Malcolm forces himself to move forward through the pain. Bonneville is assaulting Alice, and Malcolm feels the rage of the dogs from his dream build within him, and he hits the hyena on the head over and over with the paddle to free Ben from the hyena's grasp. This language describing

Bonneville's demon with Ben is extremely disturbing. Mm-hmm. I have the quote here, but I almost don't even want to read it. Just because it's, it's just gross. Here we go. Jaws and teeth closing slowly, voluptuously, ecstatically on his little form. This is not the same behavior he had with Sister Katerina, that demon exchange, and it's extremely horrifying. The book that i have has i don't know if all the other

book versions have full page illustrations in them but mine does and there's there's for some reason an illustration of this scene with bonneville standing over alice in the background and in the foreground the hyena with ben in his mouth and then malcolm coming up with the paddle to like hit bonneville and it's just like why why why do we need this picture um yeah i don't think we do it's gross i and i forgot i guess and like i said i've mostly listened to it but i i did buy this this beautiful beautiful book and and then and then i found that as i was kind of rereading to prepare for this podcast and i was like oh my god i can't believe that's included in here that's really gross yeah i was surprised that artwork being so i don't know graphic i think just we all understand the connection at this point if you're this invested in the series with demon

and with human so to see it like that it does feel like a very graphic piece of artwork yeah yeah and the way that they describe this assault more vividly for for the demons than they do for bonneville and alice just brings it to another level uh of gross for me yeah i can't tell if that's like a workaround so that it's not depicted right because this is like in a in between state i guess a young adult sort of novel and though there are there is young adult fiction right that does address issues of sexual assault and sexual violence i think explicitly and and well handles it with care but it's a strange choice it's a strange choice as you said for that to be the illustration i have a paperback copy of the book that does not have illustrations so thanks for sharing that with

us and and that fact but as you said it it is very pointed when contrasted with the earlier scene with sister karina. Yeah. A couple things that do stand out are that earlier he didn't think it was Bonvi or he tried to convince himself it wasn't Bonvi because he didn't see the hyena demon versus he just learned that not everybody's demon is with them forever next to them in that little bubble uh via tilde vasara

so it kind of feels like he's lying to himself a little bit to pretend it's not bone v because he's scared in the beginning of this chapter but now obviously we're very aware it was bone v and that bone v and the hyena were nowhere near each other so i think that was kind of a confirmation right of uh of his separation which i think we already kind of all assumed because the way he fucked up Idli treats his demon, a la Marisa. But I'd also noticed that here Asta turns into a leopard, right, when he forces himself to walk away and sever from Asta. And it makes me wonder if maybe they were choosing the leopard after Stalmaria to be brave like Asriel in that moment. Just thoughts. I think so.

Maybe, I don't know if it was like, that definitely is what they're trying to emulate there, right? And in that way, Malcolm becomes that protector figure for Lyra. Bonneville and the hyena demon separating and being able to be much further than one would expect a human and their demon to be, I think adds another layer to the pain that Alice is in. Because if Bonneville and his hyena are further than people should be, that means Ben and Alice are as well. That is why she had to stumble after him, right? Because he took took ben which of course is another mode of the violation well malcolm tries to choose the wolf inside of him that will help him punish bonneville but also wants bonneville to tell him about the rusev coffee field this is literally not the time um so he chooses the wolf with the rusev coffield i guess he was just like this one's most impersonal and unimpassioned therefore allows me to inflict more violence i guess is where

where what it's trying to say and then bonneville like says dust and then malcolm embraces all of the dogs and thinks about alice and lyra and slams the paddle once more into bonneville and then bonneville dies al Alice asks where Asta is and he says that they had to separate to guard Lyra they drag Bonneville to the water together and the CCD boat and searchlight is nowhere to be found Lyra is fast asleep

Asta is by her side at the end of her strength and Malcolm holds Asta and they weep and Alice trembles while Ben cleans the blood off her gently it does remind me of of course And Malcolm holds Asta and they weep and Alice trembles while Ben cleans the blood off her gently. It does remind me of, of course, the initial severing that breaks all of our hearts in the series, right? And when Will tries to argue and negotiate with the ferryman, with the boatman.

And he's like, be compassionate, let her take her demon. And he says, it's not a rule you can break. It's a law like this one. He leaned over the side and cupped a handful of water and then tilted his hand so it ran out again. The law that makes the water fall back into the lake. It's a law like that. I can't tilt my hand and make the water fly upward. No more could I take her demon to the land of the dead.

Whether or not she comes, he must stay. I take her demon to the land of the dead. Whether or not she comes, he must stay. Just the idea of water and the way that water flows and how water will always flow back into the lake there and what the ferryman said to Will and Lyra, it really came back during this time.

It reminded me of that. But did the ferryman try hard enough, alright? Because we just saw that you can be up in the air in the water. Oh my god. Ask Phil, alright? Because we just saw that you can be up in the air in the water. Oh my god. Ask Phil, okay? But you're right, absolutely is reminiscent of that scene

here. Like Lyra, choosing between those two duties. It's very cyclical, right? Using water in general, just like you were talking about transitions from passages of life earlier too it's just very cyclical and like the idea of like growing up and sacrificing the part of you and getting rid of something a part of you and having to leave it behind as you go on

that pain returning to the water like it's holy i will say at least here you know unlike with pan who wasn't entirely sure what was happening asta encourages malcolm to do this and has consented to it right yeah it makes a huge difference although 20 minutes ago if you asked asta yeah as i was like i don't like this but i guess that's part that's part of why it's constructed that way right because you wanted they wanted to play up like how painful it would be for asta and then also for ben of course in these moments yeah alice pulls a blanket over both herself and ben and then malcolm puts lyra in his arms with their demons between them and the blankets wrapped around them he pinches out the candle and they rest well they do deserve a nap after that goddamn horrible nightmare of a day uh and i deserve a nap personally after that nightmare of a passage but i digress uh But I don't like that Pullman is utilizing assault to heighten the stakes and prove to us that this is an adult book.

If you have not read The Secret Commonwealth, I will not say anything right now. And I'm sure we'll discuss more of these kind of repercussions in the discussion later. But this assault of Alice did not serve as anything for her character it served as character growth for malcolm only and at the same time it was portrayed as kind of a lesser suffering than severing uh to make philip really spent time making the point being that severing is the most awful feeling in the world. Obviously, there's no clarity as to whether Alice and Ben did sever in this moment too. On a more visceral level, I would say like, as someone who's been assaulted, I would say you probably are severed

from your soul when you're assaulted. That Pullman doesn't choose to follow up on that or face any of that in his storytelling is something interesting. If I was writing a series about humans and their attachment to their soul in kind of an animal form, I would probably interface with that a little more. I don't know, I think this is such a solid story with a bunch of really great lore, great supernatural lore. And even if he had left it really vague as to what happened here or had left this out, I would probably have no qualms with it, but he doesn't. I don't think that Philip Pullman understands how powerless being assaulted makes you feel, how you feel every day in your life after being assaulted.

And it's different for many people, but I don't think he specifically understands how that feels. And it's disappointing coming from a reader of another fantasy series that does have violence against women pretty regularly used, and sometimes it can be gratuitous in some aspects, and that can be disappointing too, but it's a different disappointment. This use of assault as a plot device really felt like a use of assault as a plot device to me. There are ways to leverage your tension, and the moments before Alice is dragged from the tent are some of the creepiest, most intense, suspenseful moments. But you don't need to assault your only female main character

in order to make them worthy of existing in the plot. You can build this tension without that. And I don't know, we can talk and connect the dots later with how this translate through in the secret Commonwealth. But this is kind of a dark plot that has no major ramifications or consequences for this main female character, or like, you know, any plot effect or any discussion on how it affected her and her life and what happens in her life because of it and that's disappointing and frustrating yeah and i think what's disappointing and frustrating is it's it's barely a plot right and i i think everything that you said it's it's very true And I know that assault is something that you've experienced.

And thanks for talking about that and sharing it, because I do think it is something that Pullman doesn't... It's not even that he doesn't get it right. It's that the focus is wrong. You shared with us about the kind of idea of the severing and a lot of people when they talk about sexual assault and sexual violence they talk about this this moment of dissociation right that they are that they just sort of try to leave their bodies and pretend that it's not happening or they'll sometimes they'll pass out right or black out right just to not have to deal with it and that that's that's what's so frustrating about the way this scene is framed the entire scene the focus is on malcolm's pain and his parting from asta

as you've pointed out there's a lot of language and detail put into that and how traumatic this is for him but none of it is focused on alice's trauma at all like they come back and they return to the boat and like the rape is alluded to a little with ben licking alice and then alice covering herself the shame that people feel but in this moment then like that's like a line right but the focus is on malcolm and asta comforting themselves after they reunite and apologizing and weeping to one another. And we don't really get that same moment for Alice. And I understand like that the story is written in like close third person

narration with that focus on Malcolm's character, but like that, there's nothing, there's nothing there, right. Of whether Alice or Ben need to feel the need to apologize or, or regret that they share within one another for letting it happen to either of them even though it's a completely irrational thought right none of it is their fault but there's a lot of guilt and self-blame that happens with sexual assault that isn't rational and then there's no focus on her at all after this the moment passes and into the next chapter it's like none of it happened uh alice just keeps moving forward and

malcolm doesn't ask how she is after that after seeing the state that she's in maybe i guess it's arguable you know one way to read the text is divorcing it from the author's intent and just working with what we have on page is it that malcolm's too young to understand what has happened to alice right we've seen that he doesn't quite understand these things earlier on in the book but also should we then be reading it as is it Alice stealing herself and trying to move past it, bury that trauma and pain, and using Lyra as a sort of anchor to focus everything on her and going into a default mode so as to not have to deal with what happened. But because none of that's really addressed or brought forward in any way. And that it's left to the reader's imagination to do that, to do that heavy lifting of the narrative and of this girl character's pain.

It ends up that Alice's story, her assault like that of many survivors, right? It's just ignored and written over. survivors right it it's just ignored and written over i agree with you guys 100 and i can't speak to chloe's experience and again thank you for sharing but i will say reading the amber spyglass the the separation between pan and lyra was the most hard hitting emotional beat for me in that book. And I'm talking about bawling, crying, like multiple times on multiple rereads. And just the fact that he, like you said, kind of used this assault to put the focus on Malcolm's pain, it actually diminished that whole part of it for me, too's something this a separation moment for me i was like okay i know how i feel about this this is gonna break my heart and and it didn't even it

couldn't even do that because it's just so upsetting the way it all played out so i i yeah i hate this it's really frustrating yeah justice for alice yeah i also wanted to add that like something else that's frustrating right is this book and his dark materials again both of them are sort of following these young characters during a moment in their lives right when they're going through puberty and getting to know their sexuality and it happens very explicitly on page for mal Malcolm. We see it very prominently in the Amber Spyglass with Lyra and Will, right, with that moment of dust. Malcolm is starting to, for some reason, right, during this strange journey that he's been on, find that perhaps his hormones have started running, right? And part of it is, I guess, because of his journey with Alice. And Alice's journey of sexuality is more complex, as it often is when society brands you a girl, right? And it's thrust upon her from the beginning of the story when she's assaulted as well, sexually

assaulted while working. She's sexually harass harassed she's a teenager and someone gropes her and she has to defend herself and stand up for herself in that way it comes up again of course in her encounters with bonneville earlier on in the book right and she like many insecure girls right like latches on to that attention that Bonneville shows her and then finds that, you know, this isn't, you know, thankfully she figures out, she's like, this isn't what I wanted, this isn't right. But it's a very fraught and dangerous moments for her, her journey towards figuring out her sexuality. And then for it to happen here like malcolm gets this sort of like cheerful awakening to his sexuality whereas alice's ends up with a sexual assault she's not

i don't wouldn't say that it's written like she's punished for having spoken to bonneville i think that's the most insheritable reading of it it's possible that is a that is one reading an interpretation that you could take from this i don't think that it does read that way thankfully right she's not narratively punished for having dabbled with an older man who paid her compliments in a time when she wanted affection but unfortunately you know she does like this ends up happening to her and also like i will say at the very least it doesn't play into the narrative that assault and violence uh happens from strangers that it's often people that you know i guess but yeah i think that it does a lot to inform bong vi's character above all else that's true to make him very villainous to make him this dark horrible

villain that has been slowly plotting how to use his power against the powerless throughout the entire story and maybe that's a a way to read it as well as far as how it affects his character and all of this but it is frustrating because in the united states version of labelle sauvage alice's age was changed from 15 to 16 alice is 15 in the uk version uh and i think for me like even story aside that you set out with your one female character who has had to babysit both an 11 year old and an infant this entire ride on the trip malcolm does not change lyra's diaper not once he's 11 12 whatever i don't know when i was a 16 or 15 year old young woman as we've discussed it i can't tell you that i would ever listen to an 11 year old boy and what he had to say even if he has like a black belt in karate and he's a super spy and whatever Malcolm is.

But like, I just it's not believable. And then the idea that this scene happens, I don't know, it's frustrating. It's frustrating because no matter how I spin it, it feels like Philip Pullman set out to rape his female protagonist of the story from the very beginning that he wanted bone v to end up sexually assaulting alice as her big climax of her arc like no matter how you spin it bone v was a predator and was preying on alice the entire story and no adults cared because they're all too busy yeah and yeah yeah no adults cared and and at the end right no adults care either i mean that's also you know that is accurate right for for many i agree people's real life experiences it's i mean there's many ways that of course this does reflect some experiences but i just wish that it did as you do, right?

Focused on the other side of those experiences, one that centers the survivor. It makes it feel like Alice was an accessory to the story. She was there to watch the baby. She was there to ask Malcolm, what are we going to do? And she was there to be the object of the predatory behavior from Gerard Bonvy. gonna do and she was there to be the object of the predatory behavior from gerard bonvy and therefore that women's pain women's violence against women is an accessory in men's stories thank you that's it that's the book everyone i'm so glad i'm just kidding that's how it feels to me and unfortunately as we'll get to in the discussion i'm sure uh

it's not the only feeling we have well deep breaths now that I'm done being mad at Phil for a hot second you know I feel like I now have the right to call him Phil gonna be real honest with you after that no this uh let's

let's row on in to the last the last one chapter 25 a quiet road cause the action Let's row on in to the last one. Chapter 25, A Quiet Road. Because the action's not over yet, everyone. The flood had peaked. The authorities had to spend all their pennies repairing and dealing with the devastation across southern England. The two sides, searching for the trio of Mal, Alice, and Lyra, make their way to the capital city, following rumors of the children in the canoe and the man with the three-legged hyena demon.

George Papadimitriou experienced a sense of strangeness and unreality the flood produced, traveling in a boat owned by Egyptian man, who provided him with Egyptian lore along the way. Today, the man tells him extreme weather and calm weather both have their very own states of mind ah i love this uh it's just like the alethiometer right in truth telling and truth seeking the comparison of weather machines earlier on comes back to mind here too and how will they won't they predict the weather is dark matter eliana weigh in on this um ah i do see it i do see it though it kind of is in especially as you were saying that states of mind and holding it i love this quote that you pulled up the egyptian said you think the weather is only out there it's in

here too and tapped his head so do you mean that the weather's state of mind is just our state of mind? Nothing is just anything, the gyptian replied, and would say no more. I think that this line probably means much more in the context of the secret commonwealth, but I do like this idea that the weather is also in your mind that uh your state is changeable but and it's like the conditions of the world right there's no difference between the inside and out this is just what the world is and it kind of reminds me of chloe i finally caught up i don't know if you watched the last season um of the magicians television series i did finale which does work as a series finale, even though it was meant

as a season finale because the show got canceled. But it does work. And it does remind me of a mechanic that ends up happening there. I can't it's so funny you said that because I was thinking that and I'm trying to get my best friend Dylan to read this series. He still hasn't read it. I haven't read it yet. Because he loves the magicians. I'm trying to get him to read his Dark Materials because he loves the magicians and has trying to get him to read his dark materials because he loves the magicians and has finished it and you know i do think this theme is much more reoccurring in the secret commonwealth it comes up a lot more a lot more frequently however i do think that it's introduced in the bell savage especially with malcolm saying no no

everything is always something and kind of these thoughts back and forth with Hannah Ralph in the first quarter of the book. So I think it's being set up to really continue being a prominent theme in the last book of dust and hopefully have some meaning. It's funny that you, the magicians came up and we're talking about this book, because that was a book I borrowed. And it was on my bookshelf during the flood. And that copy got ruined. And I never finished reading the book. Oh, I read the first one. I haven't finished the rest.

But I have read the first one. I watched the first season. And then I fell off of it for some reason, even though I really enjoyed the show. I need to get back into it. I liked it. Yeah, I don't know if this thing that I'm talking about happens in the books or not, because I haven't read the books. And also, the television series, my understanding is diverges no very largely it diverges quickly and swiftly and hard yeah okay so so i i don't know this might just be a

show only thing but i like the show okay yeah i love the show i would recommend finishing it we should definitely read the rest of these books, though, the magician's books. I think you'd like them, Eliana. I've heard so. George and the Egyptian man speak to whoever they can find on the way, getting information, most of which is wrong or a legend of sorts. They say that these children are like water ghasts or spirits, bad luck from the fairy world. Papa Dimitri accepts the nonsense in a very serious manner because the ccd would hear the same problems the truthfulness isn't important in the rumors but the reaction from the other side would be nugent and bud schlesinger were likely

facing the same problem on their side of the water but every hour they come closer to london i thought that was so interesting that the rumors they're hearing especially with these children coming from that fairy world and the rumors of them being on the water moving at night the ccd now sees malcolm alice and lyra as fairies and witches and supernatural and more than that as enemies it is super interesting and i love the different stories of what people say that they saw on the water and how like it does very much veer into the supernatural descriptions i'm just like but what if what if they literally did see that right what if that isn't just like them like being like in in the heat of the moment seeing something ridiculous but what if that is

what they saw malcolm and alice as because i mean they really did sail through the fairy realm what if like they're just the way that they saw malcolm and alice through that like i don't know fairy field or whatever like distorted the way that they appeared to other people that's what the fairy food did they ate the fairy food yes yes i like it i like it i mean i think it has to at least give them some sort of special immortality-esque power going on something's gotta i mean there must be something something's afoot is what i'm trying to say and it's not just a culinary experience. I don't know. Malcolm's also a foodie on top of Karate Master. That is true.

He is, actually. You know who doesn't grow up to be a foodie despite tasting fairy food? Lyra. What's an omelette? She's eating fucking egg shells and serving it to people. Hey hey you gotta crack a few eggs that's true to put shells in your omelet she does learn eventually well across the water another group is nearing london malcolm wakes up earlier than he likes to images of the night before alice and

lyra are still asleep and he knows that he will wake them if he gets up he peers out at the graveyard it's even uglier in the daylight than it had been at night. And he feels sick. But it passes and he slowly untangles himself, putting Lyra down in the blanket softly and getting out of the canoe, holding Asta in his arms. He feels guilty, sad, shaken, and older. And he presses Asta's face into his neck. He thinks that maybe one day he would be able to talk to her about the pain,

but now he was full of regret at hurting her. If it was like his, the pain she was feeling was so deep it seemed to inhabit every atom of her. We couldn't do anything else, she whispered. We had to. It's true, we did. Could he wash the blood away? would the steps ever be clean again his body quailed that's a that's a rough line right there it is would the steps ever be clean again his body quailed ptsd okay it's going great it's going great it's going great alice calls for him her face blurred with sleep and blood from the night before and he softly moistens a towel in the grass to help clean her face she climbs painfully out of the boat holding lyra who needs a change badly they're

down to the last diaper and her face is red, possibly sick with the cold. Malcolm and Alice both don't seem able to go much longer, but they know they have to get wood for Lyra. Malcolm reaches for the paddle to wash the blood off before he goes to find the wood and the paddle is broken. The blade and the handle still held together, but only just. Any strain, the slightest push up against the water would break it off entirely. Malcolm turned it over in his hands, dismayed by beyond expression. So this reread of the story really got me. This is pretty intentionally a parallel to Will breaking the subtle knife, right? That's kind of what it feels like.

He looked at Mrs. Coulter. She had turned around silently, and the glare from the sky reflected off the damp cave wall, hit her face, and for a moment, it wasn't her face at all. It was his own mother's face, reproaching him, and his heart quailed from sorrow. And then, as he thrust with the knife, his mind left the point, and with a wrench and a crack, the knife fell in pieces to the ground. It was broken. Now he couldn't cut his way out at all.

Yorick even needs them to bring him wood covered in resin to fix it, which reminds you of Malcolm using resin to fix LaBelle Sauvage. Interesting. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but when we start the Amber Spyglass, this is something we'll definitely come back to. It's a really big trope, though, right? It's part of the hero's journey i'm actually re-watching heroes the tv show right now oh my god and it's one of my favorite tv shows of all time i don't care season two was fine and if you want to argue with me about it you can email us at girls gone canning at gmail.com uh but season two is fine but anyways i'm re-watching heroes and uh one of the main characters hero he his sword breaks in an episode no spoilers and he says he's very disappointed

about it and he says even if the sword is sharp i am not fit to wield it malcolm and the oar has a lot of that hero's journey he wielded his oar to protect him alice and lyra this oar was used to kill bon vie and it's something that malcolm would never want to do right take a life even if the sword is sharp he is not fit to wield it in that way and uh that's got to be weighing on him right now pretty heavily as he tries to wade through the water with his broken oar that's a great comparison i did not i didn't even think about that and and that catch with using the resin yeah i didn't i was curious about it and i was rereading it when yorick asked for he wanted wood covered in resin from the woods

specifically and i was like wait a second resin really resonates they could use some blood moss, though, right now. God damn it, Eliana. Yeah, they could use some blood moss right now. For real. Well, Malcolm is exhausted and at his limit. He's nearly in tears. And Alice asks if, well,

Malcolm, can you just, like, mend the ore? And he's like, yeah, but we need tools and a workshop. And Alice tries to calm him, reminding him that no matter what, they need to start a fire. And he looks to tiny, listless Lyra for motivation to continue on. He tells Alice, don't touch the broken ore, in case they can mend it before it breaks further. And he goes back to the mausoleum, looking to steal another fence post and coffin lid apologizing to another skeleton once the saucepan is heating at the end of their clean water malcolm goes to work to mend the ore he needed something to bind it to and he finds rusty wire in the fence post it was all he had and although difficult to work

with and his hands end up cut up and scraped after with the blood red rust after malcolm rinses his hands they both note that the water is finally going down and they push off back into the flood under the gray sky the land they pass becomes more urban and the paddle feels weak but at least the current is taking them rather quickly and he uses it mainly to steer alice and malcolm are both aware that lyra is not in a good state and they steer intently at the shops until they find a few that they can ask for help from they make it to a one where a gentleman is inside and they hold up lyra tapping on the glass and hoping for his help the man guides them to the back of the story where the water inside the shop is the same height as the water outside the shop,

up to Malcolm's thighs. They tie off to a drainpipe, and he asks Alice to come with him inside to get the stuff they need, hoping the products are all on the high shelves. They need medicine, milk powder, diapers, and the shopkeep starts to question them, seeming a little bit twitchy. He gives them what they need with a fake cheerfulness. He mentions in passing he doesn't know how the shop's going to recover from all this as product is floating by them in the water. Malcolm gives Lyra a little medicine while trying to whisper to Alice that there's another person present besides the shopkeep. Alice whispers back she saw the other person. It's a woman who's keeping out of sight.

Lyra complains when they give her medicine, but she eventually takes it. Alice watches the people through the reflections in the glass. The woman leaves the store, and Alice swears under her breath, saying, Bastards! They know they have to move fast. The shopkeep returns with diapers, and Malcolm asks if he can take a roll of adhesive tape to go. He thanks the man, who says he'll go next door and find them a little food too. In fact, the man becomes very friendly and extends them the comfort of his home, saying, oh please you should go rest, but Malcolm's like,

no no thank you, we must go sir. They make their way to the canoe, pushing off right away, and Alice quietly says the woman was going to the police or to the CCD or someone in the authority. Once they're in the clear, Malcolm fixes the oar with adhesive tape and removes the wire. It doesn't seem like it's going to hold very long, but they hope they don't have much further to go. Haha,

they hope, bitch. He says as much to Alice, who's like, we'll see. So I will say I think that this is a great scene that shows how ingrained the CDC is right we had something similar to the scene but where they loot the store a few chapters ago and whereas the the beginning of the book right follows the League of Saint Alexander shows just how ubiquitous the CDC is right especially having children acting as spies between you know his dark materials and the

books of death series we see a lot of really overtly malicious cdc people like we're literally gonna see like children getting shot in a second also we've seen children getting torn apart you know they're severed from their demons but these people here they aren't part of the cdc yeah they're acting like a little sketchy and like someone's going to go to the authorities or the police, right? But I feel like the way that they're portrayed, they feel to me more like almost like Sister Fenella, right? They're just people that really trust in the system that they don't realize does not have their best interests at heart. I don't think that they're really trying to trap Malcolm or Alice. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.

But to me, they seem like a really generous couple who suddenly sees these two tired, bedraggled children. Maybe they've been told, hey, keep an eye out for these kids. And they've been told that in reporting about them, they think that they're taking these children to authorities who will help them. But it turns out the authority, this time with a capital A,

based on that other series that this is a spin-off of um will not help it is kind of sad it's like very realistic uh i mean resources are always misallocated and the children that need help never get the help they need while the authorities go after things that are probably lesser priority-wise or resource-wise that they don't need quite as much resources and it's it's really sad because that's how families get broken up and how families you know don't get the help they need yeah fuck the authority oh my god all my homies hate the authority. All of them. I guess speaking from personal experience in these flood type situations, like you can't just wait for anybody like to come help you. You have to rely on your community. And that's definitely something that I've seen time

and time again, not just with that flood I experienced, but with the dozen or so hurricanes I've experienced in my lifetime, too. People really have to rely on each other. And your neighbors really can come and help you and save you and give you those things you need. And yeah, that's what this reminds me of right now. It's just you don't have anybody else except whoever is around you at that moment to help you yeah nice of these couple but yeah maybe not quite their priorities are not quite all there yeah i mean why are you giving them all this stuff to help them and then calling the authorities on them fam i mean i think that they think they're helping you know exactly but it's ill-guided

yeah bummer well they get away in time though which is surprising right like that they like just immediately get away i think that they like take off and there's no i mean maybe that call is what gets the authorities to catch up with them though so never mind maybe i'm wrong maybe that's what we're supposed to take from this cut right because it turns into an action movie again oh wow yeah we head back to an overview of the flood and the water level rose and fell all the way up river as far as teddington but now the flood has changed things the tide comes in twice a day and all the boating except urgent boating had been stopped for that time being many barges and lighters have been torn loose or swept down the river to slam into the banks or capsizing lost

in sea bridges were shaken badly many collapsed and few still standing our friend bud s rode the wild water trying to calm the fears of the boat's owner. The owner yells out that there's been too much debris and their hull will be smashed. But Bud asks how much further to Chelsea. The boat owner hopes to tie off now and avoid, you know, dying in the flood, but Bud pushes them on to aim for the West bank.

They plunge on and he asks if the man has heard of October house about to point out some sightseeing as they go. But suddenly on starboard, a large navy blue and ochre ship had surged crowing them. I love Bud Schlesinger. What an opposite, right? Because he's out here like, Wahoo! We're on the water! We're going crazy! And George Papa Dimitri was like,

very demure, minding what the Egyptian man is telling him. Like, ah, yes, this all makes sense. And a bunch of less thinkers out there like, yeah, let's ride it again. I love it. I love it so much. I'm sorry. This reminds me of another flood story.

So in my parents' neighborhood, my parents' house is in the lowest part. So they flooded first and the worst. And they came up the street to a friend's house, but it started to flood here too. Anyway, long story short, anybody that had a boat was just helping rescue people. And my dad got taken out of the neighborhood on a boat and they crossed our yard to get to like the main road to get a higher ground. And my dad is just like, he took a video. And on the video, you can hear him say as they're crossing our yard, I mow this, I mow all of this,

like he mows the grass, like I take care of all of this. And this just reminded me of my dad be like, Yeah, hey, what's look at this. This is mine. I don't know. I'm sorry. That's so silly. I love it. I love it. Flood memes. Hashtag. Poor Howie. I know. So many. Those must have been like, I don't know. Does the grass grow back even like

more? Or is it like drowned? I don't know. Did he have to mow all that grass later? Yeah, he did. I think they brought in these really weird bugs too that normally aren't around and so once the like the floodwaters died down then everybody's grass turned like yellow and i can't remember the type of bugs they were but it was everywhere uh like the water brought in some crazy bugs that like nested and killed a lot of grass. But it's, you know, it's all back to normal now-ish.

As normal as the impending doom of the earth can go. Yeah, the drainage issues that caused a lot of the flooding have not been fixed. So we just live in constant fear all the time. So, yeah. Exciting. Thank you for coming to my flood talk your flood talk fuck well bud schlesinger and the owner of the boat hang on for dear life because they are almost knocked down and a deckhand leans out trying to knock Bud Schlesinger down from his surfing man pose. He draws his pistol, shooting at the boat, hitting its hook and knocking it out of this deckhand's hand.

The boat surges ahead, but meets an obstruction in the water and goes up. The engine screams and the boat wallows in the water behind them. The captain of Bud's boat is like, what the fuck, who was that? And Bud's like, that's a CCD, so we better get to that there October house before they do. They throttle forward and Bud looks around at the shapes in the water. It's impossible to tell if any of them happen to be a canoe with a boy, a girl, and a baby, just so you know. I don't think he's looking that hard,

but it is impossible to tell. Downstream, Lord Nugent's boat slams into the lawn of october house the october house is a great classic white building with a huge lawn and i love that we're once more introduced to this like avalon style beautiful place right this beautiful place that's uh the white house on the hill also with that the maze on the island earlier right that long sweeping lawn has been such a common thing that the kids are trying to get to yeah there's nowhere to tie off and Nugent gets out all the same he just starts wading through the water to the giant boathouse he has eyes only for one man on the deck with a welding torch he calls out to him it's Asriel with no time to spare Lord Nugent asks

if the boat is ready to go on the water because Asriel needs to go save his daughter. Meanwhile, LaBelle Sauvage is moving swiftly down the water to London and the tide is near its height. They're getting slammed left and right and Malcolm keeps balance the best he can, but there's definitely no stopping. He hears a creak, as if LaBelle Sauvage's framework was giving way, and a wind starts to blow, lashing cold water at them and moving them under the gray sky. The creak grows louder in the wind, and Alice begins to worry as well, but they have to keep going. Just keep swimming, but don't be swimming, because it's a flood. Every time they see somewhere, they could make a shelter.

They try to turn, but the flow of the water is too much. Alice holds Lyra tight and Mal feels a surge of love and regret for bringing these two girls into this whole thing. But he can't dwell on that right now because a new noise has arrived. It's a siren. It shrieks behind them and the clangor of bells begins to come from, and brings more new noises, the roaring of an engine, wood being pushed together, and human cries. A massive blow comes from behind, and it seems that there's a powerboat on their trail, slamming into them continually.

It is, of course, a CCD boat, trying to push the canoe sideways, but La Belle Sauvage hangs on somehow for dear life, staying upright while Malcolm fights to dig the broken paddle into the water and get them out of it. Because it is, yes, that kind of siren with bad evil people boats. But I would not blame any of you for thinking it was the other kind of sirens based on all the other crazy shit that we've seen in this story. Broken glass. Shouts of anger. Everything is impossible to hear as another powerboat joins the mess. There's a lot.

There's a lot of boats. He's really asking a lot of us right now. I'm just putting that out there. This is a lot. This is sensory overload, Phillip. So many fucking boats. Too many boats in the kitchen. Yeah. Well, Malcolm and Alice can see

nothing during this time same just boats and boats and they even hear a gunshot amongst the other loud noises suddenly cold water begins to gush in and nothing will stop it but thankfully Lord Asriel appears roaring pass her up to me and Malcolm agrees and is trying to tell Alice, yo, that's him.

That's him. Pass the baby up to him. And so they do. They hoist Alice up also. Ben is clinging to her waist as a little monkey. And the first boat smashes into the canoe again, a death blow. The brave little boat breaks open like an egg oh you gotta feel sad about that i do feel sad uh it's it's like the the real death of a character in this book like that's that's yeah

yeah and the boat is just like falling apart in the water and asriel finally roars at malcolm and malcolm's about to titanic it right he's like no i'll just go down with the ship and asriel's like now you boy and he shoves the rucksack up first and alice agrees alice is like take it to asriel and then malcolm stands in the canoe with asta coiled as a snake important snake for knowledge around his leg and an iron hand scoops him up in the other boat falling onto the wooden deck yeah as well as like shut the fuck up dido yeah he stared down with rain lashed tear-filled eyes as the little Belle Sauvage smashed a matchwood died and was born away forever nothing then but the noise and the plunging thumping swinging at the powerboat on the wild water what a death that was the goddamn little boat that could I honestly was very sad

and disappointed we don't hear about Malcolm immediately trying to resurrect LaBelle Sauvage in the end of the book obviously the time jump here doesn't allow for that and no spoilers for the next book but I guess that time jump doesn't allow for it either I mean the first thing I would have done is make a new boat I'm gonna be honest or put that one together I don't know I would make a new LaBelle Sauvage. But it was his demon, right? Like, LaBelle Sauvage is his other demon. Yeah, like the stick. Like Stick Stickly or Plank.

This is Stick Stickly. Smashed, and now here it is. Exactly. Smashed to wooden pieces. Nothing more than a skeleton in a box, you know? Nothing more than a wooden coffin he destroyed in a mausoleum yeah it's kind of what is this supposed to be like his Hedwig I don't know his childhood yeah

this is Hedwig and the innocence I I also think like you know to some extent that first La Belle Sauvage right it got it spruced up by Asriel how much of it was the original boat? You know, that famous paradox. Theseus, yeah. I'm like, couldn't couldn't Azrael sponsor a new boat? I mean, he did like

save your daughter and he went through all of this, brought your kid to you. I'm like, Azrael, you're good for it right like get this kid another boat is he yeah he's got business in the north maybe maybe not him but papa dimitriu like bud schlesinger one of them can afford to get this boy yeah yeah someone someone nugent was gonna sell him off to like like, a child molester. So how about Nugent buys him a fucking new boat?

Jesus Christ. He owes him. Yeah. He's gonna traffic him. Absolutely. My copy of the book has another beautiful illustration of the boat kind of breaking apart. It's just, like, a hole in the side. I'm gonna hold it up for you all to see. Why does your book only have hurtful illustrations

I don't know it's a really pretty book though it is interesting that it's like implied the gunshot breaks the boat but also breaks Malcolm right? it penetrates the boat

and it won't stop gushing in water and then it also Malcolm gets shot. So Malcolm and Alice cling together. Lyra between them. They're demons clinging together, too. And the movement stills. The engine falls silent and a wave of exhaustion falls over them. Asriel decides this is the moment he's going to yell at Malcolm for saving his daughter,

and he demands to know, what the hell do you think you were playing at, Malcolm? And Malcolm intends to answer this, but he is very out of strength, so Alice answers instead, which, realistically, you probably don't want Alice to answer instead of Malcolm, is what I think. Playing? You think we were playing? This was Mal's idea. He said we'd bring Lyra to you and keep her safe because, by God, there was nowhere else she'd be safe.

I was against it because I thought it was impossible, but he was stronger than me, and if he says he'll do something, he'll bloody do it. You don't know nothing about him to ask a stupid question like that. Playing?

You dare even think that? If I told you half of what he's done to keep us alive and safe well you wouldn't imagine it could be true you couldn't dream of it whatever mal says i believe so take that fucking smile off your face you yeah addendum to that and the audio version she drops the f-bomb twice um wow so instead of saying uh and if he says he'll do something he'll fucking do it and i'm just like yes it's awesome i love that you don't hear it too much in this book but but hearing it twice and i did a weird thing where i was like i don't normally do this but just to kind of triple absorb everything to prep was i was following along and listening and

and so i was able to catch some of these differences i was I was following along and listening. And so I was able to catch some of these differences. I was like, Oh, I must be listening to the UK version of this novel and reading the American version or I don't vice versa. I don't I don't know. But I liked it. I wish that was in the written text that I have. Yeah, I didn't know that it was two F-bombs i prefer that the audio version is great now i stand that's wonderful i mean this is this is my kink you know uh alice parslow telling off azriel balakwa i i am a noted hater right uh unfortunately of azriel he just pisses me off you know i don't care how big it is azriel it's not that good it's's not good enough to wreck worlds and shit, okay?

It might be good enough for Marisa, but not for me. Not for the environment. I agree. I agree. But, you know, Marisa, I don't know. She didn't have the best taste. Maybe in clothes. No.

We've all made mistakes, Marisa. Well, after this wonderful scene, we move to Malcolm, who's barely conscious now. He thinks he's dreaming, but sees an almost amused expression on Lord Asriel's face at Alice's ferocious dragging.

Malcolm finds the energy to drag himself to his feet and explain himself and his goals for Lyra. Scholastic sanctuary he had wanted to get lyra to jordan but the flood was too strong and also he didn't know the latin words so they hoped that they could at least get her to asriel and he'd take care of it so mal holds out the business card lord asriel had given him and is like i'm so glad we could finally network in person and lyra cries behind him passionately he tries to hold himself together but then he passes out but just before he passing out he hears someone say the boy's bleeding he's been shot glad that he got to know what happened

to him before he passed out malcolm wakes up in a different place it's small hot and close to the engine he's in a gyroctor and his arm is blazing with pain. Alice is squeezing his hand, but immediately looks for Lyra. She's wrapped up tightly, fast asleep, panning around her neck as a little green snack, and Asta lies cat-shaped in his lap, and he tries to pet her, but his arm throbs even harder at that. You know, I do have to say, you'd think that

since they're in a gyropter, they're urgently heading towards a hospital for this kid who's been shot, right? That's what we're all thinking, right? No, that's not where they're going. They're going to college. You would think that.

You would think that. Well think that well they probably have is anyone studying like is anyone in med school right at this college i'm sure they have some sort of medical attention that he's never brought up in any of these novels but it just kills me that well it's killing malcolm too yeah is anyone gonna take care of this kid who's like 12 years old and has been shot? Give Malcolm a boat. Give Malcolm medical attention. Free healthcare. Give Malcolm universal healthcare. For real.

Well, when he comes to, Asta's like, we're in a gyroptor. Asriel's flying us and the rucksack is by his legs. He feels his arm very delicately and he feels a bandage and alice is like well you've been shot and she adjusts the way he's laying so he doesn't hurt his neck as he just goes right back to sleep again over the thud of the engines alice hears asriel shouting over to

her and she can't hear him so she puts on these earphones which connect to the microphone and he tells her to listen carefully he's going away and he wants lyra to be found safe when he comes back the best way to ensure her safety is to stay inconspicuous quiet and for them to go back to the trout with malcolm take up their normal life and tell no one but the master of jordan about this he tells her the master's a good man and that she can trust him well that's good because it's you know i trust the master of jordan with my life yeah i actually reading this is great yeah i trust him entirely same and i mean he tries to poison him later that's so crazy

that's how much he yeah like that's intense trying to poison someone like your own parent to protect you i trusted master of jordan well the ccd is going to be watching all of them very closely and they'll need to stay away from lyra until it blows over azrael had wanted to take lyra with him to the north where obviously there's a lot more danger going on but she'd already found two very good guardians they descend Ben in greyhound form licking Pan's serpent head and Alice holding Malcolm's hand the aircraft settles to the ground Asriel commands his servant Thorold we know Thorold to guard the machine and he tells the children to bring Lyra

and the rucksack and follow him. Alice scoops up Lyra, Malcolm hauls the rucksack, and they make their way into Radcliffe Square in Oxford. They follow him into a large garden with buildings on both sides, and they follow a stone passage, and Asriel takes Lyra from them. Stalmaria, his demon, wants to see Lyra, and while watching them, Malcolm gets an idea. Azrael confirms they're at Jordan, and Malcolm ignores his pain in his arm to rummage in the rucksack for an alethiometer. He says it's a present for Lyra,

thrusting it among her blankets. The door opens, bolts unlocking, key turning, and the master, a distinguished-looking man, peers out at them in astonishment, shuttling them into the college quickly as asriel puts lyra in his arms before he can protest asriel gives the master the latin words malcolm doesn't know we're gonna give this the best shot we can um college try yeah the best college, Jordan College try. Secundum legem de refugio scholasticorum. Protectionem tegimentumque vius collegi.

Profilia mea lyra nomine reposco. Asriel said. Look after her. It's pretty pretty good I can't argue with that that got me I mean I can't argue with it either because I don't know what I'm arguing against I don't know what I said well the master wants to argue

so someone on reddit Havoc98 gave a pretty good their own college try at it and said that this translation comes to according to the law of scholastic refuge. I claim the protection and coverage of this college in the name of slash on behalf of my daughter, Lyra. I almost liked him just for a moment again he's got some moments i guess in this book but yeah a couple a couple this is yeah this is azrael at his best for sure yeah just just just this i mean it's that and also but at the same time it's like what so everyone thought you were just like so untrustworthy of a father that no one was like oh i brought your kid to you

so you could take care of her they're like no i brought your kid to you so you could put her like in school so someone else could take care of her i mean obviously that was the loophole right that the loophole is that asriel like if lyra were his care, wouldn't be able to hold on to her. But I'm just like... Yeah, I mean, like, at the same time, isn't he just handing her over so he can go do his master plans on the North? Which eventually lead to peace, kind of. Through some murder. Yeah, all you have to do is, like, you know, murder your daughter's friend once.

Best friend. Best friend once. Whatever. Who cares? Wait a second. Are you saying a Parslow suffering for... Never mind. Sorry.

Oh, I said it. You know, they're cousins, y'all. I'm just saying. Alice and Roger are cousins. I'm sad. Sorry. I'm just saying. Alice and Roger are cousins. I'm sad. Sorry. I'm really sorry. I'm a bad person and I feel really bad about it.

The master argues right away with Asriel. He's like, she's not a scholar. And Asriel's like, well, your turn. Good luck. I tried being a dad for a month. It didn't work out. Good luck, master. Yeah, Asriel's like, I'm not paying child support.

She's yours now. Asriel looks to Malcolm and Lyra and tells the master to treasure them. Bloody, shivering, disgusting, exhausted. Treasure them. I love this line. And this is the last part of Asriel that being Asriel that I like, but treasure them. That's just a nice thing to say. And then the master absolutely does treasure them.

Well, I guess we maybe not Alice so much with her job, but you know, she's taken care of for the most part up until he's, he dies. And am I allowed to be upset that they weren't included in the opening of HBO's, his dark materials in the first scene? I mean, I upset that they weren't included in the opening of hbo's his dark materials in the first scene i mean i get why they weren't included but it is i was really

disappointed i was i mean i get it i totally get it and you know i guess we'll talk about this more in discussion but alice was technically included no spoilers at one point in the show but got cut in uh lieu of another character but it was a bummer you could have just shown a little ginger kid and a little scowling girl i mean yeah and i guess another difference here from the show to this is uh the master doesn't seem to be answering the door and like chest high water to accept this baby like he is in the show it's kind of weird so you know to be fair though like that was written before the book was even published right so they had to get that from pullman and he actually like let them have the information to put that in yep it was oh i didn't know that it was right before like they had to get the okay

on it and put it in oh i guess so okay yeah it was right before like they had to get the okay on it and put it in oh i guess so okay yeah because i remember hearing that they were gonna do the show back in like 2015 and being super excited and the book didn't come out until 2017 so yeah that makes sense yeah so i don't know too i don't know how much they knew necessarily like if they knew malcolm and alice were a thing at that point i mean they probably knew that was going to be the focus of his book of those characters but it didn't i guess it doesn't make sense to bring them in let's be real yeah and even if you did you cast them with maybe the intent of um adapting these books later you would not be able to use the same

kids um it would be very because they would grow it would be very x-Men. You know what I mean? Like how none of the X-Men have all the different X-Men franchises. None of them really have that arc that connect them at all. It would be a little, I guess it could be off, but it's not awful. But it would be connected. I would have been fine with it. Because Lord Asriel is an X-Men

and in this television series. My god, Eliana. I'm about to be an ex-girl gone canon if you keep it up. Fuck. That was great. Alright, Asriel leaves. He leaves Malcolm to pass out

on the Turkish carpet, LMAO. Straight up, this book ends and Malcolm passes out from loss of blood on the carpet in Jordan. And Alice catches him. And in the silence, baby Lyra begins to cry. And that's literally the end. Malcolm passes out from his fucking gun wound.

And we do close with Edmund Spencer, the fairy queen. Now strike your sails, ye jolly marin mariners for we become into a quiet road where we must land some of our passengers and light this weary vessel of her load here she a while may make her safe abode till she repaired have her tackles spent and once supplied and then again abroad on the long voyage where to she is Well, may she speed and fairly finish her intent. And of course, it says to be continued. Just catching this as you read that last bit, in the silence, Lyra begins to cry.

That's how the book ends. And it's like Lyra saying, chronologically in the story, it's my turn now. Attention on me, please. Next three books are about me. Interesting. Huh. I love that.

Yeah. It's her book now. It's her story. Pass it over to Lyra. And it is good. They should. They should be passing that mic. Yeah.

Yeah. Indeed. Cool. I want to say we brought this up a couple episodes ago but now that we're here i just have to highlight again lyra remembers there being gunshots in her childhood story and horseback and all this and uh it turns out she wasn't so crazy after all there was gunshot there was craziness wild westness going on in her childhood story. I thought that was really a fun thing that he turned around on its head, that she had all this idea of swords and swashbuckling,

and it turns out, yeah, your origin story is pretty swashbuckling, kid. Absolutely. There's a lot of action, a lot of boats. Maybe not a lot of swords crashing, but boats crashing into one another. Boats and guns. That's very pirate-y. Yeah. Yeah.

Is this, uh, so yeah, the Fairy Queen. I love how this ending passage, right, very much, of course, is, uh, it feels like a eulogy for La Belle Sauvage, the little boat. Yeah. It is. It is a nice little eulogy. I mean, fair ye well mariner uh and again as you kind of outlined it's a goodbye to childhood that's true to the child he was it is also that i wonder if like there's more to it though right we did see a fairy queen in this and and lyra has been eating some fairy food it opens you know with a small segment of a poem as well and i was trying to do

some reading on both of the poems and just like think about the different themes as they come up and the final themes of the story right of of the end of the story and i'm not sure i think it really does dovetail nicely into the secret commonwealth as we get into the discussion in a minute we'll talk about that i guess but the secret commonwealth i feel like this story has much more of the magical fantastical elements in it than the secret commonwealth which has a bit more of the political elements in my opinion going on still some fantastical elements but definitely political elements too that are much stronger and not through an 11 year old's eyes and i think that is an interesting way that this poem takes

us to the next story well i like the trilogy title being the book of Dust, but I almost think it maybe should be the Secret Commonwealth. And then if these themes are going to at least continue through the third book, too. It almost seems like it works better. That third one's going to have some sort of rose title, right? It's got to have some sort of something.

Something to do with the roses. I'm on to you roses well before we get to the third book which isn't even there yet we're waiting phil keep writing please uh what do you what do you think your final thoughts were on labelle savage ladies what overall overall how do you feel about the story i like it the best so far in this new trilogy like i said it's triggered a lot of things for me emotionally i've just due to my own experiences i think the the mystical supernatural stuff is fun but also a few times it was like my first time through it was really confusing and jarring and i'm like what, what's happening? What's real? What isn't real? I have no idea what's going on. I had no knowledge of the, a lot of the mythology that a lot of these

things are based on. So, but it was, it's an adventure. And it was super fun the first time through just kind of coming back to this world after so, so many years. And yeah i i like it i like it a lot except for the parts i don't like yeah right um yeah same i like it a lot except for the parts i don't like it's a lot of different things right it's an interesting structure to go with for a story it's not a very traditional structure i think right in terms of how it works right it starts off very slow and there's some of that world building again and i love the the beginning where you kind of get those little scenes of this sort of childhood of malcolm's and then it it as it does ask our young heroes to go on this journey

and then you just hop from like island to island and it's like sort of meandering story until you get here to the end and it's very much it feels like an interesting deepening of that origin story for Lyra. How did she get to be where she was? And it's a fun thought exercise turned into a book and as you said I don't really know all of the things that inform some of the the legends and stories but i i like that the book has encouraged me to learn more about those those myths those legends and folk tales etc that's a really good point i also want to say i like how baby lyra is just very true to the lyra we know just some of her just little things they say about her i'm like oh yeah that's that girl's not going to change very much as she grows up. Like she already,

I feel like she already is who she is as a baby, you know? Yeah. Like when they go through the dam or through the waters and she laughs and they're like, really? We almost died. You laugh.

Okay. This is a shit. I love it. Or like when they put her in that produce box, when they take her back from the CCD church. I mean, people just love putting Lyra in boxes, right?

Yeah. Oh my god. Call Marisa. It's foreshadowing. You make a good point in the idea of the expansion of lore and that it encourages you to learn more about the lore that he's making references to whether you know what it is or not or encourages you to research

right because pullman loves storytelling and it brings back that line that beautiful mary malone plot thought of tell them stories right make words tell them stories because that's ultimately what he wants he wants people to research those fairy tales and research those stories and keep those stories alive, which is kind of that common theme of this secret commonwealth and these magical creatures of keeping their stories alive. I will say in regards to keeping their stories alive, some of it is unfamiliar to us. Right. All three of us are American. is unfamiliar to us right all three of us are american and i get the sense that like some of these might have been part of a more i don't know british childhood right some people are especially because you know maybe their friends tell them or their parents families pass down those stories to them and also i wonder if and i'm sure it does right this story feels different if you

grew up in in britain right if you got to experience oxford right there's all these things right the the references to the thames river right Of course, we know it, like, have, like, seen it, but it doesn't have that same, I think, sense of, like, cultural weight that it would for people who lived and for whom, like, a society grew around it,

right? So, I've heard that, like, Oxford is a very interesting, like, place that is so like the architecture and like the way that it looks is just so fantastical that like of course someone would write a story about growing up there so yeah i think that ultimately like it was a really great story with gorgeous prose a a distinct supernatural lore overtone, and that pain of being an earth-minded child stuck in a changing modern world, a fast-moving world.

I think those were really great plot beats. And those themes of disparity we even got to explore in the beginning right at the Trout with Malcolm and his family and class and how he's not going to be able to go to secondary school with all of these kids that have families that are able to do that. I really loved that. I loved that ground building and kind of his life at the inn. I do agree it gets a little meandery in that second half, like you said. And I mean, it's a great story that ultimately falls flat when Philip tries to prove he's not a youth fiction writer anymore. It's good when it's effortless, and the story is really nice and flowing when it's effortless, but I can just tell when he decides to put so much effort in to prove something,

and to prove that, you know, this is an edgy adult fiction piece. It's overall good, heart-wrenching, suspenseful, a letdown in some aspects we've discussed already and aspects we can discuss later, but I liked it. I like it overall. I think I liked it better the third reread. This was my third reread, and I think I liked it best the third reread as far as plot comprehension and seeing some of those themes and stories and lines fall together, but I liked it less on the third reread for some of those themes and stories and lines fall together but I liked it less on the third reread for some of those beats that I mentioned making it fail

for me so mmhmm absolutely well you know I think we could we could sail away right leave this behind us for a little talk about another shore. And by that we mean the discussion.

Right. And if you have not yet read The Secret Commonwealth, or would like to avoid spoilers from it, please tune out now. Alright? Here's another point in which you can hop off on this journey. Tune out now. And again, we will see you in the Amber Spyglass, or if you ever come

and revisit these episodes, but now we are going to enter our discussion, where we do talk about the Secret Commonwealth. Look, having this as framework for the Secret Commonwealth, knowing that malcolm has basically trauma bonded to renezme oh my god i mean lyra you really put that in there is this does that

not make this weirder like i feel weirder about malcolm and his feelings for lyra now than i did two months ago is what i'm trying to say And I felt really weird about it two months ago, but now I'm like, cool, so you guys had this big traumatic weird experience together when Lyra was an infant and you were 11, 12, and just coming of age and understanding how your dick works. And now you're in love with lyra who was your student also i i personally me um without any i i guess i could say without any like i don't i hate him

like classifying it that way but like daddy daddy issues. I've kind of always been attracted to men that are older, but it is definitely not men that I knew in my childhood who were that much older than me. And that's where it's weird for me. Like, I don't think the age difference is so bad on its own. At a certain age, I think everybody's adults, it's fine. But yeah, him knowing her as a baby and then later teaching her in school and then later having an attraction for her is is weird don't don't love it it's just weird to me now that like they went through this whole experience i don't know and now you're just sticking around for a couple decades to see how she turns out.

It's like, yeah, I mean, like, I could look it over. I could look over this thing if it weren't for the teacher. Yeah, the teacher. As you said, I don't think that the age difference is that, like, you know, 20 slash 21 and 30 slash 31. I don't think it's like, I raised my eyebrows a little bit. It's not, it's not like jarring, you know, like, yeah, right, right. Whatever. It's, it's the power and balance of a student teacher relationship that really, I think, gets at me. And yeah, and then plus all of this, right? Like, at first, I was like, all right, maybe fine. Maybe I'll just

like, shove it down in the back of my mind again. And then as you brought up Chloe, when you brought up the comparison, and I had thought about, oh, that's interesting, kind of like Stalemaria, but I didn't realize he was taking on more of that maybe father role, right? Or Asta is becoming like Stalemaria. And then I was like, so like a father

figure. And you know, I can't go with the usual daddy issues thing for lyra because she has bigger mommy issues than she does have daddy issues that's true so it's not just that it's it's yeah i don't know i don't know it just feels like a weird event to get a relationship out of. That's all. It is like a little, yeah, the Renesmee aspect, the whole Twilight, you know, like you've imprinted on a child. It's definitely present in this book, right?

He was her servant for life. But he could just die. Like the last person. And that's what I think. The last person that that was a servant for life and that is that is what i think it has i mean that's his end game dude i don't know and i mean the big thing that we didn't say during the episode because i was trying not to obviously spoil it because it is such a big i was so excited when i realized alice was mrs lonsdale i mean that was i was like oh my fucking god alice is mrs lonsdale ah i remember i just like turned to my husband and was like ah

it's alice but then like alice sat there and was like well you know honey malcolm saved me from getting raped i was getting raped by the evil villain and malcolm saved me and it just didn't feel right because so maybe mrs lonsdale loves to be a housekeeper right it's a prestigious job as eliana has mentioned the past couple episodes to be a housekeeper for jordan i mean that is a big college right you You have a big job. But you know who we don't get to hear from about what they want to do when they grow up at all? Alice. Yeah. It seems like to me, the strides Philip Pullman took, I guess, regarding feminism, he was doing great with his dark materials. I mean, not not perfect, but he was doing great, great female lead character, coming of age, and even in regards to Mrs. Coulter, you know how she's had to deal with her

life and feminism through her eyes and what she's done and then for these two books he just backslides big time and it's i think that's what is so disappointing about as much as i did enjoy reading these books it just doesn't feel it doesn't feel true to the first trilogy in that regard at all it's it's like something i don't know what happened there but it it feels off because of it like you have lyra and as you said mrs coulter and you also have mary malone you have these three incredible women who drive the story forward in his dark materials and of course it was part of like what he wanted to react to in terms of the lack of that that he felt or what he felt was the lack

of that in the Narnia series and the way that he felt that women characters were punished but here it's not like I will say at least you know women characters aren't punished for their sexuality but or not in ways that aren't critiquing the the the cultural mores that cause that to happen but it's still a disservice definitely and as you said it feels like a backslide yeah i do think like hannah ralph for example started off so strong us finally getting to examine some of the conflict she's going through with this secret agency and having you know this skill that she's developed to learn the alethiometer and like that was really exciting right like that was something that i was really gripped by

and of course jesper who's the best demon jesper is the best jesper emoji jesper emoji but like that was so gripping in the front half of the story and then we had one more one or two more little hannah ralph moments and that's it it's oh yeah i'd we didn't get any closure on hannah's story it turned into the azrael lyra malcolm alice thing at the end which is fine but i do i do hope we get more of hannah in the third book of dust because even in the secret commonwealth there's not a lot yeah and in her moments in the secret commonwealth so one of them is deeply disappointing to me but i think the closure for hannah's story right she's not on the boats with poppet dimitriu and schlesinger and nugent in them her closure i guess her story is she listened to malcolm's advice brought all the book of books upstairs and she's chilling She's like, I'm so glad I did that.

All my books are safe. I'll drink some tea. I couldn't remember that she did that. I couldn't remember if she did that or not. I think she did. Yeah. Right? She got the happy ending.

It's mostly, yeah, happy ending. I would love to have, like, more of that, though. I would love to see more of Alice's internal, what we get of her in the Secret Commonwealth. Shit doesn't look so great for her right now. But, you know, just gonna keep treading water. That's what we

do, you know? Didn't look so great for her in this book, either. We could go for three out of three, I guess. Yeah. I can't believe, yeah, and as you said like the way that her assault was brought up in secret commonwealth is just malcolm saved me and i i've never heard anyone talk about their assault like that i feel like a lot like the first half of the story alice is not consistent with second half of the story alice for this book you know

what this is something that we're probably going to see in the Amber Spyglass. I know one of our friends and patrons, Juno, has chatted with me a little bit on it before, and that Lyra, and I don't I only read the Amber Spyglass two times so far. Twice, right? This will be my third reread when we do cover it.

But our friend has mentioned Lyra gets a little out of character in some aspects in the amber spyglass and i think some of it can be chalked up to meta of protecting will and how she's feeling around him but maybe this time i'll notice something else it's really not fair and i and we do it all the time but whatever they're the two series that we read i think that um pullman's a more plot driven i think uh writer than he is a character-driven writer. And I don't think that's bad.

I think it leads to some really fantastical, awesome worlds that we've loved. There's obviously great character work there, especially in the original trilogy. In my opinion, Marisa's story and Lyra's as well, they are the most character driven of, I think, all of these get, I'd get lost in a character for hours. But at the same time, I do love the way Pullman has written some of those plots and beats like you're speaking of. And I love that character-driven stuff. I love also that he does let us have the space to think of these characters and add to it. Like Marisa. I mean, I can project all day on that shit, you know? But, my God.

Overall, at the end of the day, it is what it is. And I will read the next one. I mean, I'm not going to not read the next one. But I think that maybe the way these two books, La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth, how they carry to each other. I don't know if I feel that they until i get the third book i don't think i can make like a cohesive overarching feeling about all three of them i need the third one and i don't know maybe this is just me because you know i still need to finish i don't know that they feel like a trilogy yet yeah so much as well i released this prequel book and then oh i also released the sequel

book they don't feel like a trilogy yet and maybe and i think that's why we need the third book to wrap up whatever if there is a thematic through line right or something that carries through all of these i agree it's it's a weird you're right about it being not like feeling like a trilogy with the with the gap and there being a whole other trilogy that fits in between. So it just doesn't feel all completely connected yet. I can see some of the lines, but I don't know. Yeah, we have all the supernatural stuff that they're seeing. This is a weird place to bring this up.

But I think I heard you guys talking about it on your last podcast as they're traveling through different worlds as y'all kind of compared it to going through like the windows but i didn't really interpret it that way i kind of interpreted it as these are things in their world that are hiding like so not necessarily a parallel universe. And I don't know if that's correct assessment or not. But that's just kind of my feeling. Like, this was the magical things within this world, like the witches and I don't know, the cliff gas, the other like kind of other weird creatures that they have. But maybe these are just like hidden in this world versus like going through a window parallel universe but i don't know thoughts i think what you're saying is right you know i think that's there i think we were just getting poetic fair but you know like how the idea right they're talking about the weather isn't just outside it's also inside right that idea that within each of us is a whole other world going to that poetry we all exist theoretically probably on the same plane i don't know maybe we're all in this call together but

it's still all different worlds so i think we were kind of thinking it thinking of it in that way but and even like within our own world right in the next book secret commonwealth it goes to many different countries another culture can sometimes feel like is very much in many ways like another world right that's that is to some extent what it's like when they visit shittagat say yes some of the mechanics of the world are different, but ultimately what makes it feel so different is that building out of culture and, and technology and technology is a part of it too. And those disparities exist within our own world.

They exist within the same cities as we see when Lyra traverses Oxford and even Malcolm as well. The one thing I would add is that it does remind me a bit of later on when Asriel blows everything up, right? And the lines are very blurred between these worlds and it makes it so that, I mean, you have a city in the sky, right? That looks like you could just reach out and touch it. And that paired with kind of Eliana's thoughts about the water

forcing all of the magic up to the top of the earth from being hidden. It does make me see kind of like, are the worlds colliding? Kind of like with the Asriel stuff, or are these worlds becoming available because of the shifting of our world? Maybe

just worlds attaching on, etc. I don't know. Something crazy is going on. It's like the cicadas. Are they like cicadas? For 16 days you can access this island. Hmm. Interesting. Thanks for indulging me. Yeah, I don't know. I'd like to

know, but I think we gotta ask Phil on that one. We can ask the fairies ourselves. Well, I don't know about that i don't know i uh i do look forward to reading secret commonwealth with you again eliana and we'll have to have holly back at some point to puzzle out what the fuck it all means together and you know i do want to see bud schlesinger again i think he's kind of wild he's kind of fun he makes me laugh i like him in the secret

commonwealth i think he's just a fun guy with a good heart and i don't know my other big one that i want to see resolved is malcolm's eye thing right i'm telling you it's gonna be rose oil on the eye and he's gonna be able to use it for like alethiomeating or some shit i don't know something's gonna happen with that eye i'm telling you amber amber spyglass in his eyeball that's literally it it's gotta be because every time like he gets so much closer throughout this book to like grasping it each time or like sees more clearly through it or is able to work through his spiraling light out of his eyeball and i'm like you got to use that power boy you got to manifest that i think i said this in another episode but i like that the difference between this book and the next is like in his adulthood people are like oh yes malcolm's just looking at shit in his eye

and everyone just like waits for 20 minutes while malcolm does his thing whereas here he has to hide it he's like i don't know what's happening to me but there they're just like yeah oh that's interesting too because it's almost kind of a parallel in a way for like Lyra with Pan how some people know about it and some people don't so the way she holds herself and the way she behaves

in front of the people that know versus the way she behaves in front of people that don't same with Malcolm some people know about his eyes some people don't hmm yeah it doesn't seem like it's like a huge secret it's like a thing you don't tell people because they'll be like

you're a weirdo but I guess that's true for Lyra and Pan too now that I think about it people will be like what the fuck is wrong with you it's much more yeah I mean also like you can't just see it come out of his eye at least and he's not like plagued with that but to be fair he has the same affliction i mean of severing so oh they're gonna bond on that aren't they fuck me oh okay ladies ladies. This has been such a great journey into the dust out of La Belle Sauvage into the dust.

And I'm so glad that we had Holly on for it. Holly, thank you so much for joining us to go over these three chapters, the good, the bad, the ugly with us. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure and an honor to be here with you guys. You're the cream of the crop for me as far as podcasters go. So it's always awesome. So talk with you guys. Yeah, I'm gonna flatter you. Stop that. Gosh, well, okay. Well, at least tell everyone where they can find you and your podcast online. can find me on twitter at hunt pants our his dark materials podcast where we cover the show is called we're the dust podcast so at the dust podcast and then if you are care to hear anything about the crown me and matt are covering the crown right now so

that's at lilletPod on Twitter. Yeah, we're just kind of doing five episodes at a time. We're currently in season two with our good friend Bubba at Fit and Trim. So that's a fun little project I'm working on on the side right now in between waiting for His Dark Materials and

waiting for Winds of Winter and all that good stuff. The long wait. Oh, that's great i'll have to tune in on that i'm excited five episodes at a time too so you'll be cruising yeah we just we're all just americans like kind of covering it for as a show and not necessarily like matt is really good about researching the historical stuff but as far as us talking about the characters we're talking about them as characters in the show and not as the human counterparts that they represent. But it's it's a good time. It's really it's pretty light and fun for the most part. I bash on Philip

a lot, but it's fun when it's Matt Smith for right now. So playing Prince Philip. Yeah, I know you like Matt Smith, Chloe. I do. But you know what, me and you, Holly, we're just out here bashing on Phils. Just bashing on Phils. Oh, gosh. Phils and thrills. Phils and thrills. Oh, my gosh.

You're right. I'll have to bring that up on that podcast. So, yay. Three weeks in a row of Phil bashing. It's a good time. Oh, my God. Well, thank you for joining us. Yeah, I mean mean these were loaded chapters

um in many ways not just in what they happened but very emotionally so much appreciated yeah i tried watching someone tried to show me crown but i was blackout another time another time all right thank you everyone for joining us and as we were joined by holly on this episode of girls gone canon and you know maybe you have thoughts maybe you have something that you would like to say to us you can find us on twitter and let us know your thoughts reactions or i don't know anything else maybe you have a food you'd like for us to try um you can find us at girls gone canon c-a-n-o-n over on Twitter. Or perhaps you would also like to do the same thing, but in the longer format.

You can find us via email at girlsgonecanon at gmail.com. Yeah, and make sure you're subscribed to us on a podcast platform near you. We will be starting the Amber Spyglass up in the next month or so, So keep an ear out for that and eye open for that. When we start it up, we'll probably be posting it similar schedule to what we posted for La Belle Sauvage end of the month. So tune in. We'll definitely post about it. But you can subscribe to us over at Podbean, where we're hosted, Apple Music or iTunes.

Is it Apple Music? Is it iTunes? No one knows. Spotify, Google Play. Google Plus. Google Play. Google Plus. Google Play. Google Plus. You can find us at PodBay, at iHeartRadio, at Audacity,

at Amazon Podcasts. Google us. We'll be there. I promise. Yes. And of course, if all of those fail, you can always find us on Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com slash girls gone canon, where we do have bonus episodes once a month, alternating between the two series that we cover most diligently, which is, as you know, His Dark Materials and A Song of Ice and Fire.

This month, we are going to be doing an A Song of Ice and Fire themed episode and resuming our travel through the Free Cities. Yes, very excited to cover Pentos this month in A Song of Ice and Fire. And next month in June, we will return with a His Dark Materials special episode for the Stranger tier and above. And of course, we do have a private Discord.

If you're in the Thunder tier or above, that's $10 and above at patreon.com slash girlsgonecanon you'll get access to our private discord where every month we do a brunch slash happy hour hangout so stay tuned for June's date to be announced

yeah it's going to be hot because it's summer thank you everyone thanks so much for listening hot because it's summer you're not wrong thank you everyone thanks so much for listening I have been one of your hosts

Eliana and I have been yet another one of your hosts Chloe and thank you to another one of our hosts this time around Holly we'll see you next book the next book.

The next book is going to be the Amber spyglass. Everyone. We're not jumping straight into the secret Commonwealth. Please remember that. We'll see you. We'll see you at the Amber spyglass. Bye.