Philip Pullman's The Rose Field - not yet, but soon

[TheRavenKingsDaughter]

Such a long wait.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg25k199geo.amp

But I have just this moment pre-ordered the book, due out on October 23rd. There is the slight issue of having pretty much forgotten where we’d got to in the last one …

How can you forget that bloody cliffhanger that enraged the world? 😂

Over six years? There’s been a lot going on … But it’s coming back to me.

I don’t recall actually enjoying much of The Secret Commonwealth - though there must be something that made me impatient for this one.

Ooh thank you for reminding me, something to look forward to!

I’ve just re read the secret commonwealth in anticipation/preparation and it wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered (perhaps this time I wasn’t expecting much!)

I'm relistening to the secret commonwealth and while there are some good moments it's a real slog. The magisterium subplot is so boring and Lyra's misery is depressing.

I pretend these books don’t exist they were such a disappointment. A real real slog as PP said. I can’t see the original Lyra in the characters, and Malcolm is just so obviously Will …

I will of course read the last one as I have been obsessed with the original trilogy since I was 10, but I was actually quite glad he’d taken so long with the last one 🤣 I honestly wouldn’t have cared if it was a GoT situation.

Joining in anticipation - I’d forgotten until it was mentioned in The Hallmarked Man spoiler thread. Will hopefully get around to rereading the Secret Commonwealth beforehand. I think I’ve read it twice, and id describe it as gripping in some places with some dull subplots which is consistent with my feelings about The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass tbh, the magisterium/god subplots in those were also terribly boring imo.

It’s worse than that - Malcolm is a middle-aged teacher academic (but also a spy! And a fighter! And a heartthrob!)… he’s clearly Philip Pullman.

Loved His Dark Materials but hated the misery and sexual violence in these ones. Not now sure if I will buy this, I think I’ll seek spoilers then decide!

Dislike that he seemed to be setting up Malcolm and Lyra to be a couple, with the big age gap etc.

im rereading the secret commonwealth now to remind myself of where it was left. What do people think a daemon is supposed to be? There’s a lot in this book about whether or not they are real - I don’t think they can be your soul, because surely that’s the part of you that goes through the world of the dead (and daemons can’t go there)? So are they consciousness, imagination, just a random section of your personality/qualities - what?

That's an interesting question! It's hard to say but I think the daemons are the sort of "essence of humanity" (confusingly, as they present as animals). Even the intelligent talking animals in Lyra's world don't have daemons, e.g. the giant bears. The witches however do, which makes sense as they are part-human.

We also know that the daemons are tied to to Dust/Sin - so the children who have had them severed are able to live, but they are reduced to shadows of themselves - little more than automatons. They have lost their essential "humanness", their ability to feel true pleasure or really any emotion other than loss.

We also know that daemons are sort of linked to, for want of a better word, sexuality and sexual maturity - they take on their fixed forms once they've been touched by a lover (I feel a bit weird typing that but I think it's how it's explained in the Amber Spyglass).

So I think that overall they represent the quality that humanity has that sets us apart from animals - our intelligence, our ability to feel very strong emotions, to love, to create art, to create meaning in life

Not sure if that all makes sense, I'd be interested to know what other people think they represent.

I wonder if we will get more of an answer to this question - as in Will’s (our) world, humans are not aware that they have a daemon, and the mulefa didn’t have them either. So why do they have them in Lyra’s world?

my other burning question for the new book - is will she and Will reunite? It seems clear there’s still an opening to another world in this red building - assuming I remember correctly as only 150 pages ish in.

I’m too busy coughing at the moment - but as soon as I feel better I’ll stroll down to the Oxford Botanic Garden and have a really good think about all this.

But unless the bears are there own daemons, I don’t see that possession of one distinguishes humans from warrior bears - they too have intelligence, strong emotions, love, art and fully expressed meaning in their lives …

Yes - the bears do have all those things - but they are distinctly un-human, and indeed, when Iofur Raknison tries to obtain a daemon and act more like a human, it's shown that this leads to decay and corruption in the Bear Kingdom. He is a usurper, and eventually ousted in his turn by Iorek, who is a "true" bear who has not tried to become more human.

The bears have a moral code and way of life which in some ways is like our but in other ways is alien to us. I might be misremembering but doesn't Iorek actually say that a bear's armour is like his soul, and this is why when Lyra first meets him, he has gone so off-track? So the bears are a highly intelligent and civilised species but their expression of self is different.

I suppose to expand on my original point, the humans' daemons represent both the good aspects of humanity/ human-ness, but also our distinct vices - our propensity to immorality, corruption, greed, and sin. Pullman makes it abundantly clear that a daemon can be as good or evil as their human.

I might be totally wrong about all the above btw! This is an interesting discussion, it would be amazing if Philip Pullman ever published his own explanation and interpretation.

Two more sleeps …

It’s out! Exciting. Up early today so bought it on Audible. Have trepidation after disliking the Secret Commonwealth.

Enjoying it so far!

That’s encouraging. Mine’s been dispatched - but I have to go out, so I’m hoping I don’t return to a pile of soggy cardboard (or just soggy pages) on the doorstep.

Funnily enough, my username was prompted by Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I started reading over the new year, but I’ve just this minute read that Philip Pullman feels his daemon is a raven.

Philip Pullman at 79: ‘When I write, nothing bad can happen’

https://www.thetimes.com/article/60a16bd9-61d2-4240-8caf-92c3a90dee29?shareToken=837b50f5eac2a0cc667904c7e59083dc

Great username @TheRavenKingsDaughter ! That was a great book. Thank you for the article.

I enjoy thinking about daemons, think mine would be a sea bird of some kind!

Just on my way to my local Waterstones to collect my copy 😊

I just saw this was coming out. I also had very mixed feelings about the last one. It seemed to take two characters I’d liked (Malcolm and Lyra) and twist them up. I found the build up of the relationship between them very unpleasant, particularly when you realise Malcolm’s been teaching her and fantasising about her as a schoolgirl (middle age fantasy much?). It doesn’t match up with the very moral boy he’s shown to be in the first book.

I don’t have high hopes for this one but I hope to be proven wrong!

Also very funny that Pullman thinks his daemon is a raven. It’s always a warning sign when you ask what animal a person thinks represents them and they pick a really ‘cool’ one. We can’t all have ravens, lions, orcas etc. Someone has to have a stork or a millipede (in fact, most people probably do).

A raven is a good one for a writer though. See Norse mythology. Odin’s ravens Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory).

More concerning is the age gap between Lyra and Malcolm, and IRL the belief Pullman clings to about TWAW, which all of the His Dark Materials philosophy directly contradicts. But hey, it’s Old Male Writer syndrome. They write an older man getting off with a younger woman as a form of wish fulfilment.

It’s ruined many a good book, indeed.

I think it’s writer’s prerogative to pick a cool daemon!

Strongly agree on the ickiness (to say the least) of lyra/malcolm. That and some of the writing about Lyra really pit me off the last couple of books and also changed how I viewed Amber Spyglass

I realised I find the whole idea of Lyra losing her imagination/denying the existence of the supernatural so weird and jarring - it's just not consistent with her character.

My copy is coming this afternoon, and I’ve just this minute finished re-reading the last one - in which I’d completely and totally forgotten the last chapter 😵. Looking forward to reading it now, but only half hoping some of my questions will be answered. I wonder what this treasure only Lyra can get is, and I think the camel-like human characters without daemons from the mountains sound a bit like Mulefa.