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Falling out of love with Philip Pullman

I've been re-reading The Secret Commonwealth after trying and failing to get into The Rose Field (because I couldn't remember what happened in The Secret Commonwealth).

I loved His Dark Materials when I was in my 20s, but honestly now that I'm older and wiser, I think I might be done with it.

Zoe Tuck really nails it when she says:

'I think that Pullman is in some way trying to introduce a critique of the ills of multinational extractive capitalism (he does say that there is a petroleum potash and pharmaceutical company behind some of the intrigue) AND YET I can’t help but feel like it is super-imposed onto an orientalist itinerary that locates danger and magic in the Mysterious Orient!'

Now 2/3 of the way through my re-read, I'm just wondering whether to keep reading and see what happens, or let it go. The plot is so bloody complicated, it's a lot of work. And I want to know how it all ends, but I also wonder if I'll be disappointed anyway.

Part of what I loved about His Dark Materials was that the ideas seemed so clever. But as a 40 something I'm beginning to see the lack of firm conclusions as evidence that maybe they weren't all that clever after all. Though I still hold onto the joy that I took in those earlier books.

Mainly I wonder if continuing to read so much orientalism make me a worse person. There's probably better stuff I could be reading - like stuff set in actual Central Asia and written by actual Central Asians maybe.

If this were written in the 70s or even the 90s maybe we could give him some grace. But in 2019 there's really no excuse for using the supposed mysteriousness of an entire continent as a substitute for your own ideas.

Maybe something new is coming later in The Rose Field that will turn all these stereotypes on their head... (As Zoe Tuck put it, 'Are you trafficking in bigoted stereotypes or attempting to draw them out and critique them?')