His Dark Materials author teases the end of Lyra's journey in new book, The Rose Field

Philip Pullman will cap off his Book of Dust trilogy with The Rose Field.
ByDan Selcke|
His Dark Materials. Photograph by HBO
His Dark Materials. Photograph by HBO | His Dark Materials

The original His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman brought us to a fantasy world ruled by a religious authority where everybody had an animal familiar called a dæmon. The books were hugely popular, enough so that HBO and the BBC teamed up a few years back to turn it into a pretty good TV series. Pullman has been working away as well; he's already written two books in a new trilogy called The Book of Dust. The first book, La Belle Sauvage (2017), was set a decade before the events of His Dark Materials. The second, The Secret Commonwealth (2019), picks up with lead character Lyra Belacqua, now an undergraduate, about a decade after.

The third and final book, The Rose Field, will find Lyra in an abandoned city, searching for her dæmon. And Malcolm, an important character from the previous books, is looking for Lyra. “Their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways,” reads the the official description for the book. “They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new.”

We've also gotten our first bit of text from the book. Lyra is asked, “What will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?” Ever bold, Lyra replies, “Defend it. Die defending it.”

Speaking to The Guardian, Pullman said he thinks of this next book "as partly a thriller and partly a bildungsroman: a story of psychological, moral and emotional growth." I pause here to tell you that a bildungsroman is a book about someone coming of age. It's a great, needlessly long word that needs to be used more often in everyday conversation. You could also consider the original His Dark Materials trilogy, which begins when Lyra is 11 years old, to be a bildungsroman. But you can also learn new things about yourself in your early 20s. Maybe all of life is one long bildungsroman.

Anyway, Pullman had more to say: "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.”

That all sounds in keeping with the charming, brainy brand of fantasy Pullman pioneered with the original His Dark Materials trilogy, which was tremendously successful; all togther, his books have sold tens of millions of copies. I wonder if The Rose Field will be successful enough to inspire another screen adaptation.

But that'll be a question for later. First, we get to enjoy the book itself. The Rose Field is due out on bookshelves later this year, on October 23.

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