Philip Pullman's The Rose Field is full of thorns

Readers of British author Philip Pullman have been left on tenterhooks for the last six years, as Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of his beloved children's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995 to 2000), stepped into a ruined city in a moonlit desert towards an uncertain fate.

- Olivia Ho

There ended The Secret Commonwealth (2019), the middle instalment of Pullman's The Book Of Dust trilogy, a prequel-cum-sequel to His Dark Materials. The trilogy began with La Belle Sauvage (2017), in which baby Lyra is rescued during a great flood by two working-class children, Malcolm and Alice.

In The Secret Commonwealth, Lyra, now 20, leaves her home in Oxford University in pursuit of her daemon Pantalaimon, who has gone in search of what he terms her missing "imagination".

In this universe, like the reader's but aslant, daemons are animal manifestations of every person's inner self.

The Rose Field picks up where its predecessor left off, carrying Lyra and Malcolm - now an Oxford don who also spies for an underground resistance group along the Silk Roads. Their destination is a red building in the desert of Karama-kan, through which is traded oil from roses grown in another world.

Pullman is regarded as one of the finest storytellers in fantasy fiction. Nevertheless, The Rose Field is deeply unsatisfying.

The shadow of His Dark Materials looms large over this sequel, which seeks to undermine yet falls back on the original trilogy. Fundamental aspects of world-building are called into question. Beloved characters are sidelined or even summarily dispatched offstage.