The end of “His Dark Materials,” Philip Pullman’s blockbuster children’s fantasy trilogy, carried a comforting message: Growing up may be dangerous and frightening, but it’s rewarding, as the protean innocence of youth gives way to the wisdom and pleasure of adulthood. So it was jarring to learn, in Pullman’s follow-up trilogy, “The Book of Dust,” that Lyra, his intrepid heroine, hadn’t found adulthood rewarding at all. Now 20 and a student at Oxford, Lyra is depressed, lonely and struggling miserably to understand herself.
That struggle is personified through Pullman’s great fantastical invention: Lyra, like all people in her world, has a daemon, an animal familiar who accompanies her everywhere and who represents her conscience, her soul, her truest self. But while Pantalaimon, a pine marten, was once her heart’s own companion, in “The Secret Commonwealth” (2019), the second book in the new trilogy, Lyra and Pan are bitterly estranged, and Pan eventually leaves Lyra entirely — “Gone to look for your imagination,” he writes in his farewell note.
I found “The Secret Commonwealth” agonizing to read, as this character I loved sank deeper and deeper into existential sadness. In their final argument before Pan’s abandonment, a wretched Lyra weeps as she tells him, “Sometimes I think if I could kill myself without killing you, I might do it, I’m so unhappy.”
As I followed her journey across Europe and into Asia in search of her lost self, I wished fervently for their reunion, and the cliffhanger ending of that book made me desperate for the trilogy’s conclusion. That conclusion, “The Rose Field,” has now arrived. I opened it nervously, hoping not only for a worthwhile ending to one of the greatest fantasy sagas ever written, but for one that would rekindle Lyra’s love of Pan, which is to say her love of herself.
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