Chicken Scratch

Adapting this from a Werelist post.

I liked The Rose Field. It's one I had to think about to properly appreciate, though.

It's an interesting novel. Pullman's a good writer and the feeling of the characters and setting is beautiful. The true antagonists to the book come off as appropriately clinical and materialistic, to the detriment of all other parts to their being; the narrative feels like something out of myth; daemons come off as a little more animalistic in this latest set of novels than they did in His Dark Materials--they hunt, they eat, they leave corpses. Yet upon a closer inspection, a lot of people think it's a mess.

And they're not without reason. There's dropped plot points. Pullman retcons things, even within the book itself; they're warned against going someplace because of they will surely fall victim to a sickness, but when the protagonists go there there's no indication of danger from it. Many of the events that happen within the book are never properly explained. People are killed and we never find out who's responsible. The book doesn't really resolve the main plot line at all. At the end, the Magisterium is still turning Britain into a police state and their power is unbroken even if their leader is dead.

But thinking about it more, I think that actually helps the book. The biggest enemy in The Rose Field is an all-consuming materialism that breaks all relationships, seeing everything as interchangeable numbers on a spreadsheet. The necessity of imagination and unexplained things to the psyche is emphasized over and over again. Taking this into account, that "messiness" seems purposeful. It might not actually be, since apparently Pullman had to rewrite the ending. But if you have a book where a theme is "imagination is necessary and it's not psychologically healthy to obsessively try to pin everything down," having plot points that aren't fully explained works.

This is the first novel I've read in the past couple years that actually made me sit down and think about its themes. It's something I've thought about before--working in the sciences, I have an interesting relationship to the unknown. I want to expand the boundaries of knowledge, but don't want to know everything, because if we did, science would cease. The material effects of science are all well and good (well, usually--I could go without Agent Orange), especially in my field. But part of what makes science wondrous is that it's an attempt to understand what we don't know. And for that, we need an unknown.

What would happen, if we knew everything? It would be a horrible fate for any scientist, because there would be nothing more to study. We could teach the subject, we could have people memorize facts, we could consult, but it would be the spiritual death of our discipline.