The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust Volume 3)

I read the second volume of Philip Pullman’s follow-up/legacy sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials when it was new. And that was so long ago that I’d basically forgotten most of what happened. Which was not the case, though, with the first volume from two years earlier than that.

If I was more committed to self-knowledge and remembered how I think and what and I why remember things, I probably would have begun to question if this had a more sinister, or more serious, meaning.

Because what it means, basically, is that I didn’t have a good time. Certainly not as good a time as one has when reading His Dark Materials.

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In The Secret Commonwealth (Volume Two of The Book of Dust) a sinister-feeling quasi romance plot is introduced, whereby someone who taught the child Lyra and has been around her as an older figure her whole life, decides he has lustful/romantic feelings towards her (she is now an adult, though fucking barely).

In that book, he doesn’t act on or share those creepy feelings, and a lot of online responses to Pullman’s novel at the time focused on this, hoping that the follow-up would either forget this had ever happened or, possibly better but definitely more awkward, the guy realises he’s being a creep and talks himself out of his desires.

Pullman, though, clearly saw this commentary and has decided to double down.

And he does this by basically having [almost] every single character, unprompted, giving a line of dialogue directly telling the creepy guy that it’s absolutely fine for him to date a former student he’s known since she was a child, and that the age difference is nothing to worry about, and he should totally go for it and there’s no risk of bad feeling if he does.

All this dialogue, for sure, weighs down the book. Rather than just keeping the romance and having its presence as a rebuke to the criticism (or at least as a way to ignore the disapproving response many readers felt to it), by repeatedly bringing it up in dialogue, one instead comes away from the novel with the idea that, more than anything else, what Pullman wants to communicate here is that it’s absolutely fine for lads to date young women they used to teach who they’ve known since they were children. Everything else in the book, sadly, feels secondary to this message, with any plot point, any storyline, any character, being redundant and side-lined as Pullman’s message becomes repeated scene by scene by scene…

The Rose Field is ostensibly about capitalistic colonialist war. But it’s not, really.

It’s ostensibly about seeking a remaining doorway between worlds. But it’s not, really.

It’s supposedly about magical creatures and about magical journeys and warring factions and corrupt, blood-thirsty religious leaders and it’s also theoretically about the importance of having imagination and the freedom to think creativity, but it’s also not…

Too much of it, too much, way too much, is about how it’s definitely fine for this professor to hit on this much younger woman he’s known since she was a child.

It’s weird. And it’s built off the back of one of the most perfect trilogies of fantasy writing that I’ve encountered. His Dark Materials is a masterpiece, one which I am sure will continue to be revisited by new generations of readers for many, many years yet (if we still have people with the ability to read in the future)…

But The Book of Dust, this second trilogy set in the same world…

Somehow, sadly, it just never really lands…

It expands, it does world-building, yes…

But it never quite comes together…

Is this a fantasy epic about warring religious states making journeys into other universes? Is it not this?

Is it meant to be a dark, bitter, reflection of the burgeoning collapse of society due to capitalistic greed?

It purports to be about imagination and its lack… But that thread doesn’t really end up connecting to the rest of the book’s numerous (and mostly world-spanning!) narrative threads, so what we’ve ended up with here is a book that seems to be trying to be a complex fantasy epic as well as an allegorical political text about the dangers of sliding into authoritarianism… And it doesn’t quite succeed as either, mainly because it’s quite difficult, as a reader, to know which of these the book is meant to be…

Am I meant to be reading this as a rip-roaring adventure? Because in many places, it absolutely and very satisfactorily manages to do this! Or, instead, am I meant to be reading this as accessible philosophy, with the conversations Lyra has with others meant to be taken as of key importance? Because given the flat narrative ending that meaningfully closes none of the most interesting plot threads, it feels like this second one is meant to be the case, and those conversations… just aren’t great…

The Rose Field feels like a book that has overloaded itself with intent, and rather than being a cracking philosophical novel in the vein of Umberto Eco or John Fowles, it instead feels a bit rushed… It feels cobbled together, lacking precision, lacking clarity, and building in ambiguity until it’s difficult to know which parts – of the entire second trilogy – were meant to be fun, which were meant to be serious and what, if anything, was it all for?

Because (and I must confess, I finished reading this a few weeks ago¹) the lasting memory I have of this book isn’t the play of ideas, isn’t the fictionalised fantasy world, isn’t the political intrigue, it isn’t the rich characters and the complex, twisting, narratives, it isn’t the ideas that are discussed and their impact on our world… No.

What stays with me is the fact that – for whatever reason – it was really, really, really, really, important that any reader of this novel must know that it’s fine – that absolutely everyone thinks it’s fine – for a university lecturer to date one of their students who they had known since the student was a child.

A sad, almost heart-breaking, disappointment.

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1. I took the book with me on holiday as an intended “big treat” for myself. ↩︎