Handily, Philip Pullman provides a crib sheet for The Rose Field, the final volume of his Book of Dust trilogy, and thank goodness for that. I never can make out the plots that drive either this trilogy or the previous one, His Dark Materials, both featuring his heroine Lyra.
Not that this stops them being a terrific read. Here we learn that the book is “partly a vision. Lyra’s world is changing, just as ours is. The power over people’s lives once held by old institutions and governments is seeping away and reappearing in another form, that of money, capital, development, commerce, exchange”.
So, whereas the first trilogy had a recognisable target — the Catholic Church, relocated to Geneva and christened the Magisterium, with all the lurid tropes of old-fashioned Protestantism — this has a more diffuse enemy: capitalism, unlovely development, the breakdown of social bonds; modernity.
But Pullman still hangs on to his old animus, and the villain is the head of the evil Magisterium, out to close connections between worlds, this time in coalition with wicked corporations. Both have it in for the world of the imagination, which is represented by The Rose Field, a world where real roses grow alongside the flowers of the imagination. Lyra has lost hers, and her daemon, Pan — part of her inner-self — goes in search of it and she goes in search of him.
If you start looking for coherence in Pullman, you’ll go nuts. To enjoy him, abandon any attempt at understanding what’s going on and wallow in what he’s good at: atmosphere and story. Where Northern Lights conjured the romance of the frozen North, this one summons the East. It’s full of evocative names and places — Cathay, not China, Muscovy, not Russia — plus witches, gryphons and a sorcerer.
It’s a story about Lyra growing up. But it’s really about Pullman’s nostalgia for the world in which he grew up (he’s 79): the old familiar England and a vanished Oxford. One target here is Oxford colleges which accept corporate sponsorship. He didn’t have to invent that.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The London Standard
The Rose Field by Philip Pullman is out now (David Fickling Books, £25)
