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It’s been 30 years since the British author Philip Pullman published the first book in the beloved “His Dark Materials” trilogy, an epic adventure that also happens to be a daring retelling of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in which the world is saved, rather than doomed, by original sin. Full of remarkable adventures alongside big ideas, the books introduced one of the most delightful devices in all of children’s literature: the animal daemons that reflect the characters’ souls and are with them always.
The trilogy concluded in 2000, but Pullman returned in 2017 with “La Belle Sauvage,” the first book in a new trilogy that continued the tale of his indomitable heroine, Lyra Silvertongue (and her daemon, a pine marten named Pantalaimon). An “equal rather than a sequel,” as Pullman calls it, the second trilogy jumps backward and then forward in time, as an older Lyra contends with a growing darkness in the world and within herself.
And now Pullman, 79, is publishing “The Rose Field,” the final volume in the series he began so long ago. It’s hard to overstate how eagerly his readers have been waiting for this moment, and what it feels like to finally have in your hands a book you can’t wait to start but are reluctant to finish. Reading it means that this part of your life — the part with the book still in the future — is over.
I first interviewed Pullman in 2000, after I fell under the spell of his intoxicating, multi-world story and its dazzling characters: passionate witches; fearsome polar bears who wear finely wrought armor they forge themselves; a race of tiny, hotheaded spies who have deadly poison embedded in their spurs. Talking to him felt like reading his books. He operates on many levels at once, not unlike his alethiometer, a complex watch-like device full of symbols that allows its skilled users to find answers to difficult questions.
I’m hardly the only one who has lost sleep over these books. A friend recently told me that, unable to stop reading the second book in the series, “The Subtle Knife,” while she was waiting to pick up her son at school more than 20 years go, she burst into sobs in public at the death of a beloved character. The best-selling British children’s author Katherine Rundell said in a recent interview that Lyra, “with her stubborn love and unruly vividness” is her “favorite heroine in English children’s literature.”
