Has a few...minor weak spots. Grown-up Lyra is surlier than she was as a tween, and I’m here for it, but I would have welcomed a little surliness from Malcolm, who is weirdly perfect .. But Pullman’s abilities as a storyteller are stupendous, and on full display. He keeps all his characters in constant motion, nimbly shifting point of view among them in midstream ... Pullman...[wears] his progressive politics on his sleeve, but it works better when he shows us, which he does with lashings of his rich, supersaturated prose.
Jam-packed with chases, daring escapes, splendidly operatic scene setting (including an evil sorcerer’s titanic mountain forge), strange and magnificent creatures, and charismatic supporting characters that readers will clutch to their hearts with undying love. It is tremendously entertaining ... Questions may niggle at some readers, but they don’t interfere much with the pleasures dispensed by The Rose Field, from its thrilling action sequences to the return of such indelible creations as the witches with their harsh, ascetic wisdom and ragged elegance. The novel’s moments of keen emotion resonate especially well because Pullman never stoops to sentimentality or cant.
Pullman retains the vital capacity for imaginative world-building that caused us to fall in love with His Dark Materials ... Pullman plays...authorial tricks while knowingly exploring the relationship between reader, story and storyteller ... Feminism is only one of many issues tackled shallowly here. Climate change, globalisation, the migrant crisis, fascism, alienation: Pullman sees so much wrong with our own world that in his fictional universe he crams in parallels to each ... So this is how a celestial series ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.
The narrative is an accumulation of episodes that often create a spark of feeling – of hope, or fear, or wonder – before moving on to another confusingly discrete incident. This is a book to read slowly, possibly making notes to keep track, and holding your nerve that the episodes will link together meaningfully.
Pullman excels at set pieces ... It limps rather than strides to the future. But there are still gaps in the universe, and perhaps they might be stretched and breached in the future. After all, Lyra is still young.
Gives itself the time it needs to bring Pullman’s trilogy to a fitting conclusion, but there are points when it seems to wend its way rather too circuitously to a close ... Endings, though, are always difficult, and for Pullman, the challenge is compounded by the fact that His Dark Materials delivered one of the most emotionally and intellectually satisfying conclusions in modern literature. In The Book of Dust, by contrast, there is a sense of threads left unknotted; ends only lightly tucked away. But this feels, in the final analysis, like an intentional choice on Pullman’s part: the ultimate reflection of the fact that The Book of Dust is a story for grownups, not children, and storybook endings are another casualty of the putting away of childish things.
The delight of watching a storyteller of exceptional power and inventiveness at work. These books will last ... A necessary voice in the debate about who we think we are.
The heart of this story, delivered through Lyra and her closest compatriots, is heavily diluted by a revolving door of scheming clerics, scholars, spies, bureaucrats, and other pieces of a vast and often tedious puzzle-plot. Yet another reason to reserve this title for adult patrons nostalgic for Lyra’s ongoing adventures and curious for answers to the question of Dust.
Pullman’s prose is wonderfully direct: His dialogue captures the natural rhythms and impulses of speech, and his straightforward descriptions are just detailed enough to be transportive but never dull or distracting. As ever, he invites us to increase our capacity for wonder even as we face the world’s torments. Like the flowers its title refers to, The Rose Field is rich, radiant and rare.
