April 29, 2025, 3:19pm
This fall, Phillip Pullman—the man behind the His Dark Materials trilogy—will publish a final dispatch from his much-beloved multiverse. The Rose Field will cap the adventures of Lyra Silvertongue, the flinty, brilliant heroine who makes the mother of dragons look meek.
This new novel will conclude Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, a series that expands on a world first glimpsed in 1995’s The Golden Compass. (Or Northern Lights, to our readers across the pond).
The Golden Compass introduced a frosty parallel universe wherein Oxford College is managed by a dark religious theocracy, human souls exist as external animal companions, and a mysterious subatomic particle governs all the magic in the universe. In its pages, we met Lyra as a plucky twelve year old in thrall to a prophecy.
Five books, several novellas, a marathon play, a television series, and three blockbusters later, Lyra’s now a wind-whipped adult, having faced down destiny and survived several cosmic battles.
The Book of Dust series begins with a prequel to His Dark Materials (La Belle Sauvage). Its second installment fasts quite a bit forward to continue the story after the events in The Amber Spyglass. The new book will resume that timeline, picking up with Lyra as an Oxford undergraduate. Per the end of The Secret Commonwealth, she starts her final quest in mortal (and spiritual) danger.
Pullman’s world is unusually heady for a children’s series. His many referents and inspirations include Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and this Heinrich von Kleist essay “On Marionette Theatre.” But for certain kinds of precocious kiddos who, I dunno, built rich fantasy lives pretending to be sainted orphans in their attic bedrooms, that intellectual foundation was catnip. As one such, I can report that revisiting these books in adulthood is extra satisfying. Especially now that I know who Beelzebub is.
In The Guardian, Pullman described his alleged final novel “as partly a thriller and partly a bildungsroman: a story of psychological, moral and emotional growth. But it’s also a vision. Lyra’s world is changing, just as ours is. The power over people’s lives once held by old institutions and governments is seeping away and reappearing in another form: that of money, capital, development, commerce, exchange.”
The dust, it’s evergreen.
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