Philip Pullman closes his two trilogies with a novel reviewers call disappointing
"Le Champ de roses," published in French this autumn, concludes both "A la croisée des mondes" and "La Trilogie de la Poussière" — but Le Temps found Lyra's final quest confused and the writing less assured than before.
Philip Pullman's "Le Champ de roses," out in French this autumn, brings together the two fantasy sequences he has built since the 1990s: "A la croisée des mondes" (1995-2000) and "La Trilogie de la Poussière" (2017-2025), both drawing on John Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem Pullman reveres, according to Le Temps.
The books take place in a world adjacent to ours, where every human soul takes the form of an animal companion, a daemon. The heroine, Lyra, first appears as an eleven-year-old growing up in an Oxford college who crosses into the polar north and beyond, encountering Will and his subtle knife that opens doors between worlds. A prequel, "La Belle Sauvage," set ten years earlier, follows two teenagers fleeing down a flooded Thames with the infant Lyra, pursued by the Magisterium — a Calvinist, Geneva-based authority hostile to "experimental theology," that is, science.
Twenty years on, in "La Communauté des esprits," Lyra has turned toward materialism and lost her capacity for happy thought, breaking with her daemon Pantalaimon, a mustelid who sets off on his own in search of a rose essence that might restore her imagination. "Le Champ de roses" picks up that thread: Lyra travels east, toward the Cité de la Lune at the edge of a desert, chasing her estranged daemon.
Le Temps, reviewing the novel, judges the conclusion disappointing, describing a hefty book whose quest across a Middle Eastern setting loses its way and in which Pullman, by the paper's account, loses some of the grace that marked the earlier volumes.
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