The Rose Field: a ‘nail-biting’ end to The Book of Dust series

Book cover of The Rose Field by Philip Pullman — ‘Imbued with melancholy’, the book ends in a ‘nail-biting’ showdown

(Image credit: Penguin / David Fickling Books)

Philip Pullman’s “magnificent” new novel is the final volume in his “The Book of Dust” trilogy, which expands on “His Dark Materials”, his previous “unsurpassed” trilogy for children, said Philip Womack in The Daily Telegraph. All these novels are set in the same world − one “tantalisingly close to ours”, but with key differences, such as the fact that humans there are accompanied by souls in animal form, known as “dæmons”.

There were some who thought “His Dark Materials” unsuitable for children, owing to Pullman’s “stringent attacks on Christianity”. “The Book of Dust” really isn’t for children: Pullman uses the series to delve deeper into various points in the life of his heroine Lyra, whom we first met aged 12, in “Northern Lights”, but who is here a young adult. Mixing elements of fairy tale, “Arabian Nights”, spy and adventure stories, “The Rose Field” critiques various aspects of modern life, including multinational corporations, and is “imbued with melancholy, beginning in a ruin and ending amongst devastation”.

“At 640 pages“, this book “gives itself the time it needs to bring Pullman’s trilogy to a fitting conclusion”, said Sarah Crown in The Guardian. The route it takes is at times a bit circuitous – minor characters appear “without definite purpose”; there are narrative “cul-de-sacs” – but the “internal motor is strong enough” to carry the reader to the “nail-biting” final showdown. If at the very end there’s a “sense of threads left unknotted”, then perhaps that is only fitting: “The Book of Dust” is “a story for grown-ups”, and “storybook endings” are one of the casualties “of the putting away of childish things”.