2025/185: The Rose Field — Philip Pullman

I’m a grown woman now, and it’s about time I heard the truth. Because I know that whatever the imagination is, it isn’t just inventing things. Making things up and pretending they’re real is not enough. [loc. 4915]

Twenty-five years ago, in Oxford in August 2000, I interviewed a best-selling fantasy author, who said (among many more interesting things) that he shared an editor with J K Rowling and that this editor had claimed not to be able to contact Rowling. (I suggested that this might explain the length of the fourth HP novel.) That author was Philip Pullman, and I can't help wondering whether his current editor is having a similar issue with Pullman himself. I found this novel overlong, self-contradictory, sprawling, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Which is not to say it's awful: there were likeable new characters, fascinating side-quests and some intriguing hints at how Lyra's world differs from our own. But a long-awaited reunion was described very briefly; a much-signalled romance fizzled out in the final chapters (which was a relief... but it was still a possibility for most of the book); and there is a conversation which basically negates a pivotal scene in the previous trilogy.

I'm not going to go into detail: others have done so, at length. There was a lot to like (such as Lyra's relationship with Asta; Ionides; the gryphons) and I did get caught up in the story. But there are also a lot of loose threads, unresolved subplots, throwaway resolutions. And one key character from the His Dark Materials trilogy is ... changed, shall we say, by revelations in The Rose Field.

It's six years since I read The Secret Commonwealth, and perhaps I should have reread it before starting The Rose Field. But that is a sad and dispiriting novel: this one was simply disappointing.

Edit to add: I was wrong about the editor issue. Apparently there's an interview with Pullman in the audiobook, in which he says that his editor made him change his original ending. Perhaps that ending would have provided more resolution.