#273: DUST.  In 1995, Philip Pullman published Northern Lights, the book known in America as The Golden Compass, the first volume in his now-acclaimed trilogy, His Dark Materials.  The American title was a bloop: the original title for the trilogy was to be The Golden Compasses, a phrase from Paradise Lost, a reference in the poem to God’s creating a plotted, circular limit to the universe—a theme central to Pullman’s story.  Milton is all over Pullman’s books (Blake too, and the trilogy’s current title is a different snippet from Paradise Lost.  Northern Lights, with the later volumes, The Suble Knife and The Amber Spyglass, introduces Pullman’s young protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, later Lyra Silvertongue, one of the most appealing and least sentimentalized heroines in what must be one of the most audacious and ambitious set of books ever published—at least ostensibly—as children’s fiction.  His Dark Materials takes place in an alternative universe and tells the story of Lyra’s falling afoul of the Magisterium, a theocratic political power based in Geneva; Lyra’s much-beloved uncle has been experimenting towards a proof of the existence of other worlds, bringing on himself and Lyra the Machiavellian ire of the church authorities.  Into this highly volatile mix is added Marisa Coulter, an agent of the Magisterium and imperiously beautiful woman with—very much in secret—her own agenda.  Over three volumes the action extends over several worlds (our own included) and a wildly various cast, including a Texan balloonist, a number of angels, a canal-dwelling community called Gyptians, a race of armor-bearing polar bears, and, adjacent to his human cast, Pullman’s most famous invention—dæmons, who are not each person’s familiar so much as their souls or selves in separate, animal form (in childhood, the dæmons vary in animal guise from moment to moment and mood to mood; only after adolescence to they take on final form).  The theological and political battles expand into open war, by which time in the third volume, reach has, just perhaps, exceeded grasp; yet the emotional centre and basis of the books remains Lyra’s stubborn loyalty to a lost childhood friend, which anchors the breadth and extravagance of Pullman’s imagination.  The three volumes of His Dark Materials were quickly promoted to classic status, and I think it’s deserved.

       In 2017 Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the announced first volume of a new trilogy set in Lyra’s world, to be called The Book of Dust.  (Dust—capital D—is the big item in the Magisterium’s theological list of forbidden topics; its definition remains throughout the books a kind of moving target.)  The first book’s action takes place previous to His Dark Materials, when Lyra is an infant, and introduces Malcolm Polstead, an eleven-year-old ginger-haired boy working at his parent’s pub, the Trout, and Alice Parslow, also a worker at the Trout, a fifteen year old girl with a tongue like a switchblade.  Malcolm’s existence has been hinted at earlier in a separate short story, Lyra’s Oxford; Alice, it turns out, will be Mrs. Lonsdale, Lyra’s minder as she grows up at Jordan College.  La Belle Sauvage was followed in 2019 by The Secret Commonwealth, which follows the twenty-year old Lyra, now a Scholar at St. Sophia’s college.  Lyra and her dæmon, Pantalaimon (now settled as a pine marten) are in bad temper with each other; Lyra has fallen under the reductionising influence of a couple of books (one of which, The Hyperchorasmians, I suspect of being a bit of a snook cocked at Ayn Rand, but I could be wrong), which leads them to do something unimaginable: they separate, with Pantalaimon off on a stated search to find Lyra’s imagination, which he claims she has lost.  With the trail of her old challenges to the Magisterium plaguing her, and Brytain under the influence of an increasingly oppressive theocracy, Lyra again ends up a fugitive, searching for her lost dæmon and further enmeshed in an investigative odyssey that will lead her—and Malcolm Polstead, and a host of other groups and races of Pullman’s imagining—across the Levant.  The last words in The Secret Commonwealth (an extraordinary visionary adventure among the Gyptians will explain the title) are, “To be concluded….”

       In the interim, a little event called Covid-19 occurred; Pullman fell victim to long Covid, slowing the writing of the third volume; only now, in November of 2025, do we have The Rose Field in hand.  As promised, it continues and expands and concludes the now vastly intricate trajectories of a half-dozen groups of characters and their intentions, converging on a desert site—a red-tiled building with a huge and wondrous mural on its walls—where the action will climax and settle, but not before including many bus trips, cheap hotel rooms, a violent storm at sea, much political maneuvering and double-crossing, a visit to the mountain kingdom of a group of gold-obssessed gryphons, a coven of witches and some remarkably evocative scenes set around the Caspian Sea.  The Rose Field never reads like the prose of an ailing man.  It’s 622 pages and if there was a breath of wasted time I didn’t notice it.

       Pullman’s themes in The Book of Dust—of thwarted and courageous imagination particularly—bring him closer to the more dire aspects of our own contemporary world than in His Dark Materials; the parallels are more easily seen, and may be a little less than surprising.  The Rose Field, when we arrive there at the end of the book, may be a reminder familiar to readers of Dante, that paradises are harder to imagine than hells (Pullman’s hell, visited in The Amber Spyglass, is quite memorably frightening enough).  But he has a moral clarity, a vivid distaste for the bullying of authoritarianism, that grounds him. Pullman never says anything foolish or silly or for shock’s sake, and I’ll take that any day.  This grounding is important in a work the size of The Rose Field and it reminds me of something he wrote in a postface to an edition of Dark Materials, thanking the teacher who introduced him to Milton, for “the best that education can give, the notion that responsibility and delight can co-exist.”  This, with The Rose Field, put me in mind of how well structured the book is, how it balances the different plot lines with a zig-zag, cross-cutting grace.  He takes time for the gardens and cafes in the Levantine towns, the sussuration of the desert, the change of landscape as desert gives way to scrub and forest.  He will give a few paragraphs to a minor character, as completely telling as a Holbein sketch: in The Rose Field, to General Ravignac, a grizzled army general momentarily rendered still by the memory of a romantic failure; in The Secret Commonwealth, to Brother Mercurius, a charming, tousle-haired and purely horrifying little opportunist. These details balance the scale and heft of the great show-pieces: the gryphons’ mountain eyrie; the sky full of witches, the storm at sea, the roomfuls of people unsure of what it’s safe to say out loud.  In this case, not just responsibility and delight, but structure and imagination co-exist, one ever balancing the other. The Rose Field is a story in celebration of storytelling, an imagining in defense of the imagination: that is, our freedom, our intimacies, our kindnesses.  “The story should lead,” Pullman has written, and where his story leads us is one urgent and wild marvel after another.  Bravo.

The volumes of His Dark Materials have been reprinted in edition after edition; there’s a very nice one-volume edition out from Everyman’s Library.  Between His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, Pullman published several stories set in Lyra’s world: Lyra’s Oxford (Knopf, 2003), Once Upon a Time in the North (Doubleday, 2008), The Collectors (Penguin, 2014) Serpentine (Penguin, 2020), and The Imagination Chamber (Scholastic, 2022).  The three volumes of The Book of Dust are published by David Fickling.