#Malcom polstead

[transmasc-totoro]

I love Phillip Pullman but by far the WORST part of the post dark materials trilogy is Malcom falling in love with Lyra. Not to say I know him better than the author but my boy would NOT carnally desire the child 12 years his junior he rescued as an infant and taught as a professor. He simply would Not he would see her as a little sister

[meadow-rue]

"Maybe it means nothing. It just is." "Everything means something," Lyra said severely. "We just have to figure out how to read it." (Lyra's Oxford, pg 6)

--- The prophecy contained more than anybody was told. As both Lyra and Will work towards reuniting, they find themselves carried willingly towards that hidden destiny.

I know a lot of fans of His Dark Materials have problems with the way the Secret Commonwealth continued Lyra’s story. I highly recommend reading this instead. The characters have grown up and changed, but they still feel like themselves, and Will and Lyra are given a chance to reunite. Malcolm Polstead also features in this story, and instead of being an unsettling love interest, he is a mentor and protector for Lyra.  In this story, Will discovers a new way of traveling between worlds and reconnects with Lyra. However, the Church has regained much of its former power in Lyra’s world and is determined to bring her down. When complications arise from Will and Lyra’s secret meetings, Lyra is forced to flee from her home and grapple with the weight of her newfound destiny. Written by user @liarbelacqua

[hisdarkmaterialsconfessions]

As much as I like the new books, I don’t like the fact that Pullman’s kind of setting up a romantic dynamic between Malcolm and Lyra. I think there’s a pretty unhealthy power imbalance there and it almost made me stop reading.

[meow-of-cathulhu]

[magiclovingdragon]

“Not all men”

No you’re right, Malcom Polstead would never do this to me!

[doloresabernathysworld]

Malcom Polstead 🤣

Being socially awkward and physically intimidating are a bad combination.

[lisaswxrld]

Sara, ci ho pensato molto e ti devo parlare... Sara, questa cosa non va.

'' Da quando ti conosco sono diventato nevrotico e ossessivo.. un maniaco geloso che è troppo possessivo.

Non mi piace quello che questa relazione sta diventando.

Così ti ho comprato.. un cercapersone! ''

😂😂😂

[i-dont-know-how-to-quit-you]

I just found out about Malcom Polstead and Lyra Silvertongue and…

[hashtagartistlife]

one of the most tragic things you can experience as a reader especially of fiction is... the moment books ceases to be magical? the moment you stop being able to just immerse yourself in the story and you can... see the gears behind the watch face, so to speak. Can see the piano wires holding up the circus.  The moment the book ceases to be fiction and instead you can see the author behind every word, directing each sentence, placing every word. And yes, maybe all fiction is a kind of deceit that is mutually agreed upon between the author and the reader and we all just know (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) to look away from the piano wires, but the circus isn’t sufficiently distracting enough anymore for me to do so. 

honestly the most tragic part about it all is i’m not even that sad about it. i say tragic but it’s nothing so dramatic as that. I feel like how my jaded twenty-five-year-old self watching my six-year-old self figure out santa claus isn’t real might feel. mild pity and a bittersweet well, that’s how it is, really. you become too grown for it all one day. which is ironic, because one of the main themes of the book itself was caution against the idea of rationality and intellect becoming the hallmarks of being grown, that we should all learn to keep open hearts and minds and allow for the irrational. 

frustratingly, i say all this but i still have book-hangover, that awful empty yawning feeling after you’ve finished something and this series in particular has always done this to me, it’s why it’s always had an immovable implacable place at the top of my favourites list. But I don’t.... like this book, the newest in the series, in a conventional way. (and by extension, I don’t think I like the whole series anymore in the conventional way.) I don’t feel glowy or happy about it or would enthusiastically recommend it to people. There are books I simply like, that i enjoy and revel in; there are books that i have a high and warm regard for by virtue of their excellent writing; there are books that profoundly touch me and I am fondly thankful for it. 

this book, this series... if i HAD to classify it they’d fall in the latter category - books that profoundly touch me, move me, change me to some extent - but I’m not sure if I’m thankful for it. Maybe I need to wait for the new trilogy to conclude before I can decide on how I feel for it. But this series has always touched something in me. The new book still does, despite my seeing the mechanism behind the glossy exterior. Is a painting less a painting because I know the makeup of the paint used to create it? Is the circus less a circus because I can see the piano wires holding it up? But it’s not just... the technical skill of the acrobats or the artistic talent of the coordinator that’s touching me. it’s the magic of the circus itself, still, even when i know it’s just piano wires. the paradox-- you know it’s all mundane, you know, and yet, as tired as it is, as jaded as i am, a little tarnished, but still... 

anyway, as a from-the-mother’s-womb catholic who was raised in churches every sunday and was born with a christian name as well as a birth name and has a deep love of hymns and still finds peace in churches and under stained glass mosaics i have..... nebulous and also extremely niche and specific feelings about the his dark materials universe and as a tired 25 year old depressed millenial just trying to survive i also have nebulous and also extremely niche and specific feelings about the latest book in it and i’d just like somebody who is more articulate than i am to just..... write an essay about my feelings for me exactly so i don’t have to go through the laborious process of sorting out my own feelings for this book 

but fuck the latest love line this book is trying to push. that part of my feelings is not at all nebulous and is very much concrete and much as i think malcom polstead is a Good Man and much as i don’t care about large age gaps in relationships irl as long as people are both consenting adults.......................................................... he’s 31 she’s 20 he saw her since she was a baby he’s been her teacher at one point and oh he’s so reluctant about it all because by all moral codes it’s wrong but everyone around him is telling him ‘you’re both adults now’ helLO SHE’S BARELY OUT OF CHILDHOOD I’M 25 AND ONLY RECENTLY CAN I THINK OF MYSELF AS AN ADULT. fuck you very much. fuck you very much for this love line. anyway. guess it’s gonna be another couple years before i see the end of this one way or another. god, i miss will. 

[thesummerstorms]

Having Malcom Polstead have an attraction to Lyra is gross and I need to have words with Pullman.

[lordeasriel]

I am curious why you chose a bird of paradise for Malcom’s Dad?

Okay, so there's this one clip of Sir David Attenborough with a bird of paradise, and every time he tries to talk about it, the bird goes crazy, screaming and singing and trying to communicate in a very bizarre way. And that's the social vibe I get from Malcolm's dad.

Reg Polstead owns an inn and he is accepted as a very respectable man in his community. Nobody fights in his pub, he keeps order in the place; he is - by all circumstances known - a good father and husband. And I like to think he is a bit flamboyant too, and so are birds of paradise. He also has red hair which I think would be a neat match to the bird of paradise I saw when I gave him the daemon.

I also really like bird daemons lmao

[asvezespedro]

A comunidade secreta (O Livro das Sombras #2), Philip Pullman

A comunidade secreta se passa sete anos após o final de A luneta âmbar, e vinte anos após Malcom Polstead e Alice Parslow (agora Lonsdale) deixarem a bebê Lyra e seu daemon Pantalaimon nas mãos de Lorde Asriel, depois da grande enchente que tomou conta da Inglaterra. Lyra e Pantalaimon, agora já adultos, sofrem com um descompasso de ideias e emoções e a convivência se torna cada dia mais insuportável para os dois.

A história de A comunidade secreta começa quando Pantalaimon, em uma caminhada noturna para espairecer de seu desencanto com sua humana, testemunha o assassinato de um homem desconhecido. A daemon do homem, notando sua presença (e o fato de estar sozinho), pede que ele impeça os assassinos de encontrarem alguma coisa, e Pantalaimon corre de volta para o dormitório estudantil onde ele e Lyra agora vivem, levando consigo a carteira do homem assassinado. No caminho, fatalmente, sente um par de olhos o observar: uma daemon-gata, que, assim como ele, é capaz de se separar de seu humano.

Toda a história do livro gira em torno da possibilidade de humanos se separarem de seus daemons, uma grande conspiração de instituições religiosas para dominarem a sociedade (este é, afinal, o universo de Fronteiras do Universo) e, ao que o final do livro indica, alguma profecia envolvendo Lyra. A narrativa se alterna entre o ponto de vista de cinco personagens centrais: Lyra, Pantalaimon, Malcom, agora um pesquisador de História que, inexplicavelmente, está apaixonado pela 20-anos-mais-jovem Lyra, Marcel Delamare, líder de um braço do Magisterium e obcecado em encontrar Lyra, e Olivier Bonneville, leitor-prodígio do aletiômetro contratado por Delamare para encontrar a garota e filho do vilão do primeiro livro da série, Gerard Bonneville.

Devo confessar que fiquei um pouco decepcionado com este livro. Li Fronteiras do Universo vários anos atrás e, além de ser um leitor com menos maturidade na época, já se passou tempo o bastante para eu esquecer os livros em si e me lembrar apenas das minhas impressões deles – que, sem dúvida nenhuma, foram bastante fortes. O primeiro livro da nova trilogia, La Belle Sauvage, me agradou bastante, reforçando essas impressões. Malcom é um protagonista encantador, seu afeto gratuito pela bebê Lyra me pareceu um carinho fraternal que me cativou, e ver sua relação com Alice amadurecer enquanto os três seguiam a enchente foi o bastante para me manter preso na leitura.

A comunidade secreta, por outro lado, teve pontos negativos o bastante para fazer com que minha leitura fosse inconstante e pouco fluida. As dificuldades na relação entre Lyra e Pantalaimon me deixaram negativamente surpreso e até desconfortável em alguns pontos; Lyra se tornou uma jovem chata, profundamente diferente do que eu me lembrava do primeiro livro, e a inexplicável paixão de Malcom por ela, sendo que da última vez que o vimos ele era um garoto de 11 anos preocupadíssimo em proteger uma bebê recém-nascida, quase me fez largar o livro.

O maior ponto negativo, porém, foi uma cena quase no final da história em que Lyra, viajando sozinha cada vez mais para leste em busca de uma cidade mitológica onde viviam daemons abandonados ou solitários, é sexualmente atacada por um grupo de soldades em um trem. Em resumo, a cena não tinha razão de ser. O ataque acontece do nada e não leva a lugar nenhum. Lyra passa o restante da narrativa fisicamente machucada, o que afeta em certa medida seu comportamento, mas não há sinal de qualquer efeito psicológico do abuso. Ou seja: se o objetivo era fazer com que Lyra chegasse machucada à cidade que tanto buscava, havia uma centena de outras maneiras de fazer isso. Não era preciso recorrer a uma cena de violência sexual que, ao que tudo indica, não será tratada pela história.

O fato de que esta cena ser seguida por uma representação profundamente negativa da cidade mais ao leste do livro também não ajudou na minha disposição, pois acendeu uma luzinha de um possível racismo contra árabes na minha cabeça.

No geral A comunidade secreta foi uma leitura leve, para não ter que pensar muito, mas uma decepção.

[argentvive]

Alchemy in The Book of Dust: Vol. 1, La Belle Sauvage

I just finished Philip Pullman’s latest installment in the HIS DARK MATERIALS series.  Curiously, it’s a prequel to his three-book series on Lyra Belacqua (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass).  Lyra is a young teenager in those books, in this one she‘s an 8-month-old baby.  

So I wondered, how would the alchemy work?  You can’t have a Chemical Wedding with an infant!  Would Pullman just ditch alchemy this time?

SPOILERS GALORE, obviously....

It turns out that I needn’t have worried.  The signs were promising right from the beginning: instead of a quotation from Blake at the beginning, this book ends with a few lines from Edmund Spenser’s THE FAERIE QUEENE, another work that draws on alchemy.  

The main protagonist is Malcolm Polstead, an 11-year-old boy who lives and works at his parents’ Inn, The Trout, near Oxford.  His proudest possession is his canoe, La Belle Sauvage, and throughout the tale he shows he is a master of WATER.  We have to wait until the very end of have him marked as EARTH as well: Alice tells him he’s “EARTHbound.”

Alice is Malcom’s alchemical partner.  She is 16 and a part-time employee at The Trout.  As their adventures become ever more phantasmagorical, the implied reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seems appropriate.  (In fact, the Guardian reviewer makes that exact comparison.)

Malcolm and Alice’s mission is to save Lyra from the many people trying to kidnap her from her refuge at a nunnery, because of an apocalyptic Prophecy.  The last half of the story describes their rescue of Lyra and their journey on Malcolm’s boat over a flooded English countryside from Oxford to London.  Malcolm is paddling in the stern; Alice is sitting with Lyra in the prow.  (Apologies for the white blotch in the middle.)

Playing the role of alchemist in the story is an Oxford professor, Hannah Relf, part of a loose anti-autocracy group, who recruits Malcolm early on to be a spy on the forces of evil ranged against Lyra.

Malcolm and Alice receive many crucial gifts.  Lord Asriel (Lyra’s father) borrows the canoe and returns it repainted and resealed and fitted with a watertight tarpaulin that makes it quite serviceable as an alchemical vessel once the boat journey begins.  Along the way they are conveniently able to restock their supplies of nappies (diapers), milk powder, and food.    

The flood causes the rivers and reservoirs to burst their banks and the water level reaches the second storey of many houses.  According to Lyndy Abraham, the FLOOD is “a symbol of the dissolution and putrefaction of the matter of the Stone during the black nigredo stage when water is the dominant element.” Malcolm steers them masterfully through the flooded landscape. They also make the obligatory stops in a CAVE and the UNDERWORLD; Pullman even throws in a visit to a FAIRY ISLE, presumably as a nod to Spenser.

Malcolm and Alice grow closer, despite their age difference, and he silently acknowledges his dawning attraction to her.  So they have a heartfelt but not-romantic Chemical Wedding at the very end of the book.

<Malcolm scrambled across to Alice, dragging the rucksack, and they sat clinging together with the child between them, all their daemons [sort of spirit animals but more important] clinging together too....>

The final alchemical image is the ouroboros:

<Lyra lay wrapped up as tightly as a mummy, fast asleep, and Pan [Lyra’s daemon] lay coiled around her neck as a little green snake.>