Philip Pullman’s young-adult fantasy classic The Golden Compass was published in 1995, two years before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Both are wildly popular, but only J. K. Rowling’s series inspired a theme park. Even after 30 years, during which The Golden Compass became a trilogy, His Dark Materials, which begat a second trilogy, The Book of Dust—collectively selling something like 50 million copies—Pullman’s books retain an idiosyncratic spikiness. Rowling’s work has a glossy, optimized feel; it’s engineered for your comfort. Pullman’s epic, which concludes this fall with the publication of The Rose Field, doesn’t leach into the cultural groundwater quite so readily.
For starters, Pullman’s world-building is spotty, probably intentionally so. Magic in contemporary fantasy is meant to function as a system, with rules and regulations, but his is wild and willful: Witches fly on cloud-pine branches; angels coalesce out of dust. His books are more permeable to the real world than Rowling’s—boat-borne refugees and climate change crop up. Not least, Pullman stakes claims; he politely but firmly declines to mince words. When Rowling wants to acknowledge her religion in her work, she does so with a few decorous, sidelong allusions to Christian faith. Pullman is an atheist, and he expresses that in His Dark Materials by killing God.
The books take place in a world not so unlike our own, except that it’s a bit more magic and steampunk. The plot of His Dark Materials is driven by the long-running conflict between Pullman’s heroine, a bold, lithely intelligent 11-year-old named Lyra, and the Magisterium, an authoritarian incarnation of Christianity. At the same time, she’s pursuing her ever-receding parents, the brilliant, amoral Lord Asriel and the delectably cruel Mrs. Coulter. Lyra, whom we first meet growing up semi-feral at the fictional Jordan College, Oxford, has a dæmon, as does every other human being in the Lyraverse: a talking animal companion/alter ego. Lyra also has the ability to read an alethiometer, a marvelous magical device—the titular compass—that can answer any question, but only by way of arcane symbols.
At issue is the nature of a mysterious energetic particle, a kind of magical Higgs boson called Dust. Is it the key to magic and consciousness, or is it, as the Magisterium believes, a subatomic trace of original sin, to be eradicated at all costs? The second and third books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, follow Lyra across multiple worlds as she engages in intricate wrangles with the Magisterium, learns more about Dust, and falls in love with a boy named Will. They are ultimately parted, when Lyra is 12 or 13, but not before they share a sweet and startling moment of carnal pleasure.
It’s a deliberate provocation: Pullman has no patience with the sexless adventures imagined by writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and particularly C. S. Lewis, for whom magic and wonder were associated with childlike innocence. (Pullman has called the Narnia books “monumentally disparaging of girls and women.”) For Pullman, the adventure doesn’t end with puberty. There is magic in innocence, but also in experience.
Seventeen years passed between the last installment of His Dark Materials, in 2000, and the first volume of The Book of Dust, but Pullman (born in 1946) didn’t get any less spiky with age. Like Dylan going electric (or, as they say in the Lyraverse, anbaric), he was back to demonstrate that he’s not here to do fan service: He gave the new book a French title, La Belle Sauvage, and set it a decade before The Golden Compass, when Lyra is just a baby. It tells the story of Malcolm, an unflappable 11-year-old boy who rescues infant Lyra from the Magisterium by ferrying her through a flooded landscape aboard a canoe.
The next book, The Secret Commonwealth, is more of a conventional sequel—but then again, it isn’t. Lyra is now 20. The earth-shattering events of the first trilogy have been all but forgotten, and the Magisterium looms as large as ever. What was it all for? Lyra has become cynical and discontented, and worse, she’s become estranged from her dæmon, a pine marten named Pantalaimon. They’re barely speaking to each other. It’s a bold volte-face considering that Pullman has just spent four whole books selling us on the intimacy and sanctity of the dæmonic bond.
But it’s worth it, because their falling-out plays as a metaphor for a state of self-alienation: Lyra has lost touch with her own soul. She’s fallen under the sway of a fashionable worldview in which logic is paramount, and the realm of emotion and magic and even dæmons is just childish fancy. The “secret commonwealth” is Pullman’s name for this realm, and it encompasses not just the world of witches and fairies but also, more broadly, that of imagination and feeling, and really the entire human enterprise of perceiving the world as meaningful.
If you wanted to read Pullman’s books as philosophy, which I don’t necessarily recommend, you could say that, having dismissed organized religion in the first trilogy, he’s now looking into what happens if you go too far the other way—he’s adding to his religious skepticism a skepticism about skepticism itself. (Note that Lyra gets her new worldview from a best-selling novel in which—yes, go on—a young man kills God.) But it’s also an astute portrait of someone coping with the psychic scars of childhood trauma. After the events of His Dark Materials, you can understand why Lyra might find an unmagical, strictly rational universe to be comfortingly stable.
Pantalaimon thinks Lyra has lost her imagination, and he leaves her and goes off in search of it. He’s not exactly sure what finding Lyra’s imagination would actually involve, but in his mind the quest becomes linked to a legendary rose garden somewhere in the Far East that’s supposed to contain the secret of Dust.
So begins a grand steeplechase that becomes the story of both The Secret Commonwealth and The Rose Field, which are so intertwined that they could plausibly have been published together as a single novel. A remorseful Lyra sets off after Pantalaimon. The reliably malevolent Magisterium sends agents to look for the rose garden too, as part of its general anti-Dust policy. This prompts an anti-Magisterium resistance group to send its own agent, who is Malcolm from La Belle Sauvage, now all grown up into a historian. An evil pharmaceutical company wants a piece of the action too—it’s a crowded field.
If this were a Bond movie, these characters would cross the entire distance by air, in first class, in the split-second gap between scenes, but Pullman leans into the arduous business of travel. They go by train, bus, boat, camel, and gryphon, stopping in far-flung Levantine cities such as Seleukeia and Aleppo. There is much buying of tickets and finding of seats and checking into hotels. There’s a lot of small-d dust. For much of the story, Lyra and Malcolm tread separate, parallel paths, though for a while, as in a French farce, they wind up traveling with each other’s dæmon.
These adventures are more earthbound than the ones in His Dark Materials, but along the way Malcolm does manage to get captured by some vividly drawn gryphons who are obsessed with gold, and hook up with Pullman’s marvelous, ageless witches. Meanwhile the Magisterium has come under the control of one Marcel Delamare, an ideologue who establishes a quasi-fascist regime in Britain. (The particulars of how—lies, warrantless searches, the neutering of the media, the criminalization of dissent, internment camps—are depressingly familiar.) Delamare also turns out for no particular reason to be Lyra’s uncle, though as a villain he looks a bit thin next to the magnificently awful Mrs. Coulter.
The Rose Field has a few such minor weak spots. Grown-up Lyra is surlier than she was as a tween, and I’m here for it, but I would have welcomed a little surliness from Malcolm, who is weirdly perfect: He’s gallant, serene, and handy around the house; like Indiana Jones, he’s somehow both a nerdy-professor type and a street-fightin’ man (though at least Jones is scared of snakes). Pullman teases the possibility of a romance between him and Lyra and then labors mightily to wave away the slight creepiness, given that Malcolm is a decade older and first met Lyra when she was a baby, and later his student.
But Pullman’s abilities as a storyteller are stupendous, and on full display. He keeps all his characters in constant motion, nimbly shifting point of view among them in midstream. I kept thinking of the brown, swollen Thames in La Belle Sauvage : Pullman’s stories flood you; they flow relentlessly, irresistibly, dividing and reuniting, pushed on by tides of passionate purpose, carrying all kinds of fascinating flotsam, sometimes choosing unexpected courses but always sweeping you helplessly along with them.
Pullman was a schoolteacher before he was a novelist, and he hammers home the theme of The Rose Field so that even the kids in the back row can’t miss it: It’s about the power of imagination and the fatal shortcomings of reason. “Without imagination you never see the truth about anything,” a wise man tells Lyra. “Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less.” If His Dark Materials was about the joyful agonies of exchanging innocence for experience—and also how terrible the Church is—The Book of Dust is about (in addition to how terrible the Church is) a way of being in the world, a kind of nonreligious spiritual practice that values meaning and feeling and art and presence. Here’s Pantalaimon describing how a younger Lyra used her imagination:
She saw everything and everyone in a light of gold. She saw correspondences and analogies and echoes and resemblances, so that nothing existed without a thousand connections to the world, and I saw them with her. For her the world was rich with meaning and alive with delight.
Having survived a Miltonic war in heaven and a symbolic expulsion from Eden, Lyra is now trying to navigate the world outside, with wandering steps and slow, even as priests and politicians and property developers rapaciously strip it of meaning, eviscerating social bonds and treating the Earth as nothing more than a dead thing from which the maximum possible value must be extracted.
Pullman tells us all of this, wearing his progressive politics on his sleeve, but it works better when he shows us, which he does with lashings of his rich, supersaturated prose. He describes every last mundane thing as if it were a precious jewel, lit from within by secret significance. Here’s Malcolm looking up at a predawn sky: “The night was just at that point when the darkness was full of little momentary swirling points of slightly-less-darkness, not even anything like the first gray of dawn, but perhaps the closest we come to seeing individual photons.” Lyra’s world has a cozy, Miyazaki, my-favorite-things feeling, with its narrow lanes, gleaming clockwork, teetering stacks of books, crashing thunderstorms, and, oh God, those brown-paper packages tied up with string! When Lyra gets a mystery parcel in the mail, Pullman makes a feast out of it sexy enough to scandalize C. S. Lewis, as she slowly cracks the sealing wax, unknots the string, and unfolds the paper to reveal … another package inside.
Conversely, when it comes to magical things, Pullman renders them in the most mundane, tactile language possible to give them weight and texture. His magic isn’t numinous or ethereal. Here’s his description of an enchanted stone:
It was a long oval in shape, about the length of his palm and as thick as the tip of his little finger, a dull greenish-black with no iridescence; it was smooth, as if with long wear, the edges worn down thinner than the center. It was very hard; he’d tested it with his pocketknife, and hadn’t made a mark. It felt a little heavier than it looked.
There’s a tension in this passage, and really in all of Pullman’s work, that comes from a happy mismatch between his style and his subject. He’s a supremely tidy, orderly writer, a meticulous artificer, and yet he writes fantasy, the most disorderly, unruly of genres, a messy confabulation of myth and dream. Part of the thrill is watching him try to make fantasy sit up and behave.
The figure of the master artificer in fact recurs throughout The Rose Field—“craftsman” is one of Pullman’s favorite compliments, which you can tell because he uses it a lot to describe Malcolm, who at one point fashions a pretty circlet for Lyra out of the golden case of an alethiometer. (Unlike Tolkien, who made a nasty evil ring out of gold, Pullman adores it.) Lyra is a skilled maker too, not with gold but with narrative. Here she is spinning a story:
She felt like a musician, playing a piece that she knew by heart, knowing both where she was and where she was going, and holding back a little here to make a more effective change in pace there, seeing the span of music to come, taking her time but wasting none, including a detail at this point so it would make its effect more strongly later, cutting out a detail that wouldn’t help.
You can’t help but see a self-portrait here of Lyra’s own artificer, hard at work.
Pullman owes a lot to those earlier masters, Tolkien and Lewis, more than he generally lets on. But they were ardent Christians, at least as focused on the next world as on this one, and you’d be hard put to find a fantasist with a greater commitment to the dark materials of this reality than Pullman. The secret of Dust isn’t that it’s original sin; dust—dirt, grime, filth—is consciousness. It’s who we are. Our souls aren’t ethereal ghosts; they’re animals. I won’t give away the end of The Rose Field, but it’s no spoiler to say that Lyra doesn’t go to Aslan’s Country, the way the Pevensies do, or enjoy a luxurious convalescence in Valinor, like Bilbo and Frodo. We often think of fantasy as escapism, but there’s no escape for Lyra—that distant field of roses is not, on closer inspection, Eden. She has to nurse her scars right here on Earth, with all the rest of us. Pullman isn’t waiting for the next world; he’s trying to tell us how to love this one. It’s not easy. It takes imagination.
This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Realist Magic of Philip Pullman.”
The post The Realist Magic of Philip Pullman appeared first on The Atlantic.
