The Rose Field
Philip Pullman
What happened to Lyra and Pan
In the universe in which Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials and the sequel series The Book of Dust takes place, each human comes in two bodies. One of them looks like the usual human body you’re familiar with: the standard naked ape. The other one looks like some other animal, a fox, a dog, a hawk, etc. (Usually a vertebrate, but in at least one case an insect, a butterfly.) This second body is called the person’s “demon.” The demon is usually of the sex opposite to that of the human body. The demon of a child may take different forms, but during adolescence the form stabilizes.
The demon and the human body depend entirely on each other. If one is killed, the other dies. The demon body vanishes upon death of the person. Ordinarily they can’t get very far apart -- separation by more than a few meters causes extreme discomfort, or even pain. With training that distance can be increased -- witches routinely do this.
The demon is generally understood as a part of the person’s soul. In The Amber Spyglass it is implied that humans from our Earth also have demons, although the demon doesn’t occupy a separate body.
Lyra, the hero of His Dark Materials separated from her demon, Pantalaimon, in order to journey through the land of the dead, where demons cannot enter. As a result Lyra and Pan permanently lost their connection.
In The Book of Dust Pan leaves Lyra after a falling out. Pan thought Lyra had been changing for the worse. As he expressed it, Lyra had lost her imagination. After leaving Lyra, Pan traveled east.
In this final installment of the trilogy, everyone’s attention is focused on a big red building somewhere to the East (probably somewhere in the deserts of what in our world is Western China -- the Taklimakan, perhaps?). It is from there that a type of rose oil comes that makes dust visible -- dust being the mystic particle field connected to consciousness. In The Secret Commonwealth Lyra set out after Pan.
In The Rose Field everyone converges on that big red building. It is not just Lyra and her Pan, but also the church, and the governments and armies of Europe, as well as other fantastic creatures. Everything builds to a huge climax.
It was fun, but I found the big climax disappointing. Pullman set himself up for that, I think. [hide spoiler1] In summary, I enjoyed The Rose Field, because I wanted to know what happened to Lyra and Pan, but the ending was a let-down.
The Rose Field has a problem I remember vividly from Tom Robbins‘s Skinny Legs and All. Skinny Legs and All is a terrific novel, but the plot promises to deliver seven profound philosophical revelations at the end. Of course, when they come they’re disappointing. The Rose Field does something similar on a smaller scale. It only promises one revelation, but that one when it comes is “Money is evil.” Yeah, I’m oversimplifying, but not by much. However you feel about the question of whether money is evil, the idea is probably not new to you.