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  "createdAt": "2025-12-29T22:53:00+00:00",
  "path": "/books/the-rose-field",
  "publishedAt": "2025-12-29T22:53:00+00:00",
  "site": "at://did:plc:swxoj3wjlwodcqs5ipmvgnug/site.standard.publication/3mnv7gbn3czno",
  "textContent": "I’m going to spoil basically the whole book with this review. I don’t usually say so but this time I’m saying so. It’s the final book in a trilogy and there were a lot of loose plot threads in the previous book so if you’ve somehow stumbled on this one and you really don’t want to know the ending then come back later. Okay I think that this paragraph is long enough now that you’re not likely to accidentally spot a spoiler with your peripheral vision.-I have not felt such a sense of betrayal between the boards of a hardbound book than I did when I learned that after the 600ish pages of chasing down silly old Pantalaimon in The Secret Commonwealth, he just decided to bounce out of the Blue Hotel even though Lyra was right nearby. Lyra takes this in stride and continues on to Aleppo, and us readers don’t ever really get an explanation for Pan’s behaviour.There is, in fact, a lot of this kind of behaviour on display here. Sometimes the characters will say “I have a feeling,” or sometimes Philip Pullman will tell the reader that Lyra or Malcolm or Pantalaimon was gripped by a strange sense of certainty, and then that character will do something incongruous to keep the plot moving along or deliver some bit of exposition.If this has already happened in a given chapter, then a witch will drop out of the sky with the requisite Plot Device. In Aleppo, the Plot Device that drops out of the sky is a herd of gryphons, an immensely proud race of gold-obsessed murderbeasts whom Pan has nevertheless pressganged into his service offscreen. Lyra and Malcolm, briefly reunited, are again separated by this Plot Device, but it’s okay because they both have a resonating lodestone (remember those?), which in this book is a text messaging app-cum-Plot Device to swap hands and deliver exposition when needed.I do have to complain about the Lyra+Malcolm-shipping. It starts in The Secret Commonwealth, it continues with increasing fervour here, and it’s icky throughout. But I think that this is a function of the type of story that these characters are in, rather than an inherent ickiness. I can think of writers that wouldn’t bat an eye at shoehorning these two into a messy relationship. I can think of writers who could even put them together and keep them together and stick the landing and tell the haters to piss off. But Pullman cannot do this, and these specific characters would resist pairing even if Pullman did have the confidence because they’re uncomplicated and wholly good and one hundred percent not Problematic.Which is not to say that The Rose Field, and The Secret Commonwealth to boot, doesn’t spend a weird amount of time trying to justify it only to chicken out at the last minute. It’s not weird guys, the witches said it wasn’t weird and Malcolm’s actually the young one if you think about it guys! And the daemons are talking about it, it’s totally normal, I promise! The fact that Malcolm feels weird about it just shows what a good guy he is! It’s definitely not weird! Actualy haha just joking, he’s actually going to be with Alice, remember her? She was in a chapter named after an electric pickup truck!Anyway, while Lyra and Malcolm are wandering around Azerbaijan a bunch of other stuff is happening elsewhere, which we get to see through the eyes of the Main Antagonist. There are shady deals and weirdly personal rants and breakouts from detention centres and Olivier Bonneville, whose utility in this book I cannot fathom at all, keeps calling women bitch in his internal monologue for some reason.All of this is by way of introduction to some of the book’s Themes, which the book does have, & boy are they all over the place. In no order:Capitalism sure is bad, isn’t it?Politicians sure are corrupt, aren’t they?Hey have you heard about Big Pharma? Somebody should stop those guys!The Catholic Church is the Empire from Star WarsSomething something migrant crisis something something small boats (maybe that one was more in The Secret Commonwealth)The industriousness of the Chinese makes me uncomfortableDon’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got til it’s goneThey paved paradise and put up a parking lotAnyway some magical creatures drop out of the sky again and Lyra and Malcolm are reunited, and then they go off on a sidequest to kill a wizard (??????) and then everyone fasttravels to the place where the final boss is. No one is quite sure why they’re there, and the rules that we have been told are in force at The Red Building (guards won’t let you in, your daemon cannot come with you, you must travel by land & water, you cannot return from inside) are no longer in force. Seven or eight minor characters about whom we have been drip-fed scraps of Plot linger in the wings with nothing to do; they have emerged from nowhere, they serve nearly zero purpose, and are never heard from again. Something happens; there is an explosion; the Main Antagonist is brutally murdered for no reason in the background. It’s not clear whether fallout eventuates from any of this.The penultimate chapter ends with our heroes stranded in a foreign world where everyone’s so money-obsessed that their daemons are literally withering in place; and then the final chapter starts and suddenly everyone’s in quite a good mood and they’re all going to a moon festival? I strongly suspect that there was a bunch more book that was edited out between these two chapters because I struggle to explain the tonal shift any other way.And then the book is over.Stray observationsLyra spends maybe the last quarter of the whole book wrapped in Malcolm’s coat. Pullman won’t stop pointing it out.I also — you know how in the original three books, the “Dark Materials” are named in the title but never explicitly called by those names within the book? Like no one in The Amber Spyglass is like “hey Mary can you pass me your The Amber Spyglass so that I can look at Dust please?” The closest we get is someone describing the knife as being “subtly coloured” or something — but otherwise it’s just “the knife”. But here:She said every time the subtle knife cut through from one world to another, it left a gap that Specters could come out of.Speaking thereof: I should be more bothered that the whole tragic conclusion of The Amber Spyglass — that all the windows must be closed and that Lyra and Will cannot be together — is totally mooted by all of these new, unexplained, open windows — but for some reason I’m not. I think that because none of this book seems to have had any consequences at all, and since the conversation where an angel appears to Lyra on a ferry to be like “about those windows: PSYCH” and then peaces out is so out of context and dreamlike that it might not have even happened at all — why even put Lyra on the ferry in the first place, Philip, since it just turns around and goes back to Baku?? — I’ve mentally quarantined all of the implications from this trilogy.I counted a half dozen times where a character tells us that something is important to them and then immediately does the opposite. E.g. Strauss somehow comes back from the World From Which There Is No Coming Back and is like, “Please listen to me, you have to tell the whole world about this!” and then Pan is like “I’m all ears, go for it,” and then Strauss is like “You wouldn’t understand, I’m not telling you!” Same with Lady Silvina: “Well, who are you?” “We’re travellers, what’s up with your daemon?” “Nevermind, go away, I want to lie down.”I’m complaining a lot about this because I’m pretty sure that the His Dark Materials series were the books that made me actually like reading, and they shaped so much of my perspective of what reading is for and how you can talk to kids and how to think critically about the world. They set me off on the right track, I feel like.And these three books weren't bad. At no point during any of them did I want to stop reading them. The action scenes are good and I felt really bad every time we encountered some miserable daemon and such a palpable sense of satisfaction when all of these characters, who were separated for so long, were finally reunited. So long as I didn't think too hard about any of it, I had a good time.In a way, these books are the theme park ride version of His Dark Materials. You wait for a while, and the anticipation builds and builds, and finally you board and while you’re on rails, all of your favourite characters are here! None of it makes much sense if you actually look around but things are happening and there are lights and action right in front of your face, and everyone around you is enjoying themselves and it's good to be out of the burning sun and losing yourself a little bit in something that meant so much to you twenty years ago. And then it’s all over and you've made some new memories but you haven't been moved, and all the characters are now smiling and waving at the camera and telling you to enjoy your day.",
  "title": "The Rose Field",
  "updatedAt": "2025-12-30T07:17:00+00:00"
}