The Book of Dust (3)

by Philip Pullman

Volumes 2 and 3

The Secret Commonwealth

The Rose Field

‘And then without warning, in total silence, an immense shadow swept across the forum and submerged the man in darkness. As Lyra clung to the wall, unbelieving, the creature that threw the shadow swooped down on him …. and carried him up into the sky …. It was half lion, half eagle, immense and savage …. Lyra saw the man struggling in its claws. With him went the alethiometer.’

On October 22nd, the day before the release of The Rose Field, Sir Philip Pullman gave an interview to Katie Razzal of the BBC ***. She quoted the writer Michael Morpurgo, who has described him as a ‘the Tolkein of our age’. Pullman responded by denying the comparison. ‘Tolkein was a writer of fantasy,’ he said. ‘I am not a writer of fantasy . . . I write about the real world . . . through a filter.’ Not everyone would agree. I’m not sure I do, as  far as the first statement is concerned, but I kind of see what he is getting at in the second. Sir Philip has said something similar before, although I had to look it up. It was in an interview with the historian Mary Beard in 2019 after the publication of La Belle Sauvage. Dr Beard made her opinion quite clear: she doesn’t usually read fantasy but she had read Pullman’s classic and enjoyed it. That was a genuine compliment, and the writer appreciated it, acknowledging that he did not usually read fantasy either. ***

In The Book of Dust, there may be imagined worlds, anthropomorphic polar bears, witches and gryphons, but they are filters in a way. Lyra, Malcolm, Dame Hanna, Delmarre and the rest are real human beings with real problems and real voices. We all know or can put other names to each of those characters in our world. If the imagined ones take imagined shortcuts to achieve their objectives, that only adds an extra layer of metaphor to an otherwise very human story.

So, back to the story for a moment. By the end of Volume 2, Lyra has engaged a guide to take her to the red building in the desert. He is a somewhat dubious though likeable character called Abdel Ionides, whom we suspect has his own agenda for attaching himself to our heroine. As she makes her way across the Middle East and Asia, Ionides’ objective becomes clearer and is indeed important for the resolution of several threads of the plot.

‘I came to trust him completely, [Lyra says] and I really thought he was truthful, in spite of …. in spite of everything he said and did really. He pretended to be a sort of vagabond, a rogue, but he’d been a professor of mathematics ….’

There are creatures to be encountered, witches and angels to be met and battles to be fought. There are emotional moments too, as when Lyra meets the witch daughter of Serafina Pekala, or realises that she is not alone in the world as she had once thought. It also becomes evident that we will not be seeing Will Parry again. Instead, the author keeps us guessing about Malcolm, Lyra and that big age gape, a no-go thing apparently in YA fiction. But their relationship too has an unexpected resolution.

‘A witch can be four hundred years old [says the witch Tilda Vasara], but still seventeen. And I have seen human children seven years of age, who seem to have lived through centuries …. This man is younger than you are …. if you listen, you’ll know.’

And whatever Philip Pullman might think, the mid-air battle in which the gryphons and the witches join forces to defeat the terrifying Oghab-gorgs is true epic fantasy, as is the contest between the tiny Gryphon Gulya, aided by Malcolm, and the sorceror Sorush – reminiscent of the Greek myth of Perseus.

‘[The Rose Field] is really there, around everything. It’s everything being conscious. We’re all bathed in it, everything conscious, and everything is conscious. It’s …. it’s what metaphors do when they show us connections between things. And the way we see them is Dust. Dust is what happens when our imagination touches the Rose Field.’ 

And Imagination is what those three books are about. Lyra has lost it and until she finds it again she can never be whole. In catching up and reuniting with Pan, she will discover her real self. Can she go back, Pullman asks in the Katie Razzal interview ***, to an ordinary life after all those amazing adventures? Perhaps it’s a rhetorical question. He seems to have decided not to write about Lyra again, but authors have changed their minds before now.

Having reached the final page of The Rose Field, we may have reached the end of Lyra’s journey, maybe not. I don’t think it matters.

What matters is that we go on telling and reading stories – stories that exercise our imagination and make us think seriously about the problems of our own world.

*** I can recommend both interviews to all readers, not only as an author’s view of his creation but as a helpful guide to writing itself.

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