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 shows his consummate skill at brisk exposition, vivid action sequences and the creation of characters not easily forgotten ... The Rose Field and its companions are exciting throughout, superbly paced and written, the work of a master novelist, but they are something else too: an impassioned warning, a cri de coeur.
Lyra muses on reason and creativity in ways that often feel more essayish than inherent, narrative coming second to philosophical exploration ... Filled with intertwining narrative tributaries ... Although fantastical elements remain, alongside moments of surpassing beauty...The Rose Field is richer in anonymous offices and bureaucratic trappings of atrocity than in celestial visions and numinous delight ... [A] weary, melancholy, anti-capitalist lament ... Rejects any notion of the heavenly, and at times overemphasizes its author’s injunctions to be open-handed ... It brakes with a singular abruptness...flinging the reader against an invisible windshield, dazed and initially unsatisfied, then driven to return in search of answers, the meaning’s final shape.
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.
A vast field across which complex forces act ... There is an awful lot going on, maybe too much ... Pullman’s work is a unique stew and it’s a richer and thicker one here than ever before ... Here are huge ideas being worked out ... The sophistication of Pullman’s world-building never loses sight of its roots in spinning a yarn ... Passages centring on the Oakley Street spy ring supply the satisfactions of an espionage thriller ... Pullman is extraordinarily good at passages of bone-crunching action ... There are, whether by accident or design, many loose ends ... Pullman’s imagination so incessantly makes links and connections that it’s easy not to notice how much his is also an art of severances, disjunctions, ruptures and vanishings ... Remarkable.
Alongside much food for thought and a resistance towards offering simplistic or easy answers, there is skilful storytelling throughout – surprising twists, daring exploits and moving encounters rendered in gorgeous, elegant prose. The ending may leave readers aching for more – there’s certainly scope for further tales and a thread or two to pick up – but it is an exquisite pleasure to spend more time with these characters, in this immersive, vividly rendered universe.
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.
