Rosy

As was foretold, I have finished Philip Pullman's latest trilogy, The Book of Dust. The final volume The Rose Field is the longest entry yet. A lot happens in it! Let's jump right into some

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

The Rose Field picks up immediately after the end of The Secret Commonwealth, without a time-jump like there was between the first two books. We're pretty firmly in Lyra's world throughout the whole trilogy, primarily following the story of Lyra and Malcolm, but an increasing number of ancillary characters pop up, along with returners from The Secret Commonwealth and a few cameos from His Dark Materials.

This book felt more like The Golden Compass. The Secret Commonwealth had more of a focus on the mundane-ish world of universities, business, politics and religion, while The Rose Field had more monsters and mythical beings, as well as the return of witches and angels and other supernatural elements.

In particular, there's a great long-running side-plot about griffins: we meet some individual griffins, learn about their society and ambitions. This eventually leads into a fantastic assault on a sorcerer's fortress built into a volcanic mountain. This story feels pretty stand-alone, but the characters in it are all very well-drawn, as are the factions and rivalries and things.

I was slightly surprised by how rarely the people in this book referenced the events of His Dark Materials. There are a couple of times when Lyra mentions how she "went north", but she shares (and thinks) almost nothing about the other worlds she discovered. It seems like a really huge deal that The Authority was killed in The Amber Spyglass, but it doesn't seem to have made any impression on Lyra or the Magisterium. That isn't necessarily shocking or a huge problem - I interpreted Lyra's reaction as a PTSD walling-away, and the Magisterium might be cruising along on institutional inertia - but it felt odd to not even reference it in these books.

MEGA SPOILERS 

 I'm not complaining that the trilogy ends here, but as I was getting to the last 50 pages of this book I started to assume that we were in for a fourth novel. It felt like there was way too much stuff to wrap up, and a bunch of new things that dropped immediately before the end of this book, most especially the discovery of the Rose world. It does end, and a lot of stuff isn't wrapped up or explained. It's fine not to know, but to me this felt more like a Neal Stephenson ending where the author runs out of pages, as opposed to a Murakami novel that is peppered with deliberate lacunae.

I won't recount all the loose ends here, but a few that stand out to me include the Asian research station. We get a nice little story over a few scattered chapters about the survivors, the rebuilding, reconnecting with someone who went to the Red Building, an attempt to sell the station, and.... nothing. There's Alice's second life in London as a disavowed Oakley Street spy passing on secret messages; but I don't think we ever learn what those messages were about, or anything that Oakley Street has actually done since passing on the writing stones. There are intriguing insinuations that Thuringa Potash has been involved in the corruption of the Rose World, but their exact role is very unclear. I also was expecting to better understand exactly how the Red Building was staffed: were the guards from the other world maintaining a sort of embassy in Lyra's world, or was this an ancient Lyra-world operation that reached into the other world? And what exactly did Ionides and his lady-friend do in the Rose World? It seems positive, but there's zero indication of what actions they took, and what impact if any that will have on traffic between the worlds.

This book and The Secret Commonwealth seem to have been teasing a Lyra/Malcolm romance. It seems like it gets ejected at the end of The Rose Field, which I'm happy with. There's a suggestion that Malcolm reunite with Alice, which makes me much happier, especially given their bond in La Belle Sauvage. I do wonder what the point of this romance-suggesting was, though. I thought it just made the reader feel uncomfortable and it didn't seem to resolve into anything meaningful.

It was weird to have Bonneville kind of redeemed at the end. He was a very pathetic and put-upon character throughout this book, which had made me feel some sympathy towards him even though he still seemed like a terrible person. It seems like Ionides set him up to be a very effective assassin. I suppose it's never too late for people to turn to good.

Speaking of the assassination, it felt extremely anti-climactic for the Magisterium to lead an army of all of Europe across half of Asia and then never do anything with that army. After all that logistical maneuvering, a couple of soldiers blow themselves up and Delamare gets shivved, The End. There's so much deception swirling around Delamare and I'm still not completely clear on what the purpose of the army was: did he intend to invade the other world? It seems like huge overkill to just blow up the opening when a handful of soldiers have managed all the other portals.

END SPOILERS

There's kind of an explicit wrapping-up of values near the end, but even to the characters in the book it seems a bit tenuous and tentative. The idea of "Imagination" has loomed large over the last two volumes, with characters struggling to even define what it means, to understand why it is important, where it comes from and why it might disappear. I think that, between this trilogy and His Dark Materials, we're left with an impression that as humans we need a combination of imagination and rationality, that the interplay between the two are key to being complete people.

I did enjoy reading this series. It's been a while since I read the first trilogy; I didn't like this one quite as much, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the books themselves and how much is due to myself. My favorite was La Belle Sauvage, which works really well on its own. Taken as a whole, these do a good job at further fleshing out Lyra's world, adding more mystery and ideas and some great adventurous tales peppered with some almost cinematic scenes. Not a must-read, but a good read.