I put off reading this book for a while, because I knew it would be a disappointment. I enjoy the His Dark Materials trilogy and have read it several times. With the Book of Dust trilogy, I found La Belle Sauvage shockingly dull and I wasn’t too impressed with The Secret Commonwealth. However, I felt compelled to finish the trilogy – done and ‘Dust’-ed! I had to revisit my review of the latter and to read a summary, because I remembered precisely nothing about the story. The Rose Field follows on from it, and is an epic journey following various characters – although the main protagonists are Lyra and Malcolm, and their daemons – around the Middle East in quest of an opening to another world where special roses are grown and made into an oil.

I had many issues with this book, but I won’t list them all, because there are some essay-length reviews on Goodreads which discuss them better than I can. The two most pressing problems for me were the length (over 600 pages) and the confusing plot. I expect it all made sense in Philip Pullman’s mind, but I don’t think it translated into the book. I wasn’t sure what the whole point of the story was, except for the message that we must keep using our imaginations and telling stories to stay human. It seemed like an echo of The Amber Spyglass but with a lot of repetitious dialogue and no clear resolution. I found the book in the YA section in the library, but it was really an adult book. The characters are all adults, there is swearing, a lot of gruesome violence, and complicated ideas about the economy, capitalism, philosophy, etc. There are precisely two things I admired about the book. One is that there is a kingdom of gryphons. The other is that one of the characters is named after a victim of the Grenfell Tower fire.

In summary, I don’t recommend the Book of Dust trilogy at all, but at least I’ve completed it!

Published by Penguin and David Fickling, 2025.