Title: The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust, Volume 3)
Book Beginnings quote:
Friday56 quote:
This is what I know: without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth
Summary: This is the concluding story of Lyra Silvertongue in the world of His Dark Materials. The novel follows Lyra as she searches for her daemon, Pan, in a daemon-haunted city, with Malcolm Polstead also searching for her as they both head towards the mysterious Karamakan desert, where allies and enemies converge on a secret related to Dust.
Review: I have a love/hate relationship with this series, the Book of Dust, by Philip Pullman. Let me explain. First I read and loved the author's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy when I was a new librarian. You know those books: The Golden Compass (Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass,
published from 1995-2000. I read them starting in 2007, before I was a book blogger. I loved the story, the characters, and the world-building. Then in 2017, a prequel was published called La Belle Sauvage. It was the first book in a new trilogy about the life of Lyra Silvertongue before and after the action in the first trilogy.
I loved La Belle Sauvage. I enjoyed being reintroduced to some of the characters I'd met earlier and learning about Lyra's mystical beginning. There is a huge flood and a miraculous escape in a canoe. I couldn't wait for the sequel. (See my review here.) Fortunately, I didn't have to wait too long. In 2019 The Secret Commonwealth was published. As the middle book in the trilogy it begins abruptly and ends the same way. I was left on pins and needles, wanting to find out how the story ended. (See my review here.) I kept my eye out for the third book. After about two years, Pullman started promising his fans that he was making progress on it and then would give a possible publication date in the near future.
Six years later it was finally published. The headline of an interview in the Washington Post about The Rose Field is titled "I'm alive, but battered: Philip Pullman's new novel was a struggle." Apparently Pullman got COVID during the pandemic and it sounds like it may have turned into long-COVID, a side effect of the disease which zaps people of energy for a long time after recovering from the infection. He also experienced wrist and/or hand pain so he had to use his computer to write the book, instead of his usual handwriting. One would think that would have made the process easier, but apparently it broke his writing habits and that really shook him up. At 79-years-old it was hard for him to establish new writing rituals. All of these three factors led to some depression which made writing more difficult.
One more thing, which Pullman didn't really talk about is how long the book is, 672 pages. The six-year time period between the middle book and this book also led to a lot of confusion for me. I just couldn't remember all the details of the previous stories. If you were to read the reviews of The Rose Field on Goodreads, many readers criticized the book for not wrapping up all the loose ends of the story. To me it felt like Pullman had so much story to tell and didn't know how to close it himself. So he wrote and wrote. Finally his editor said "stop", so he stopped. I am not saying the ending was horrible, but there definitely was not an "ah" ending for me. In an interview between the author and his audiobook narrator, Pullman talked a little bit more about what he was trying to accomplish and why he left so many loose ends at stories end. I especially liked what he had to say about Lyra and imagination and was able to relate it to some of the problems we are facing today with politics, climate change, etc.
Though Pullman clearly had so much to say, he said he is definitely done with Lyra and her world. He thinks he is too old to tackle another book in the series. That's good because I've probably too old to read another one. Ha!
My rating: 3.5 stars.
Merry Christmas!
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