Clearly not mating season, so I guess they were just In The Mood

And of course integrity of process is the best general guarantor of accurate results. You might be able to cut corners in a certain case and still get the right answer, but once you start cutting corners the whole system degrades.

In conclusion, Morgan McSweeney for D-G.

I’m very happy to have spent a bit more time in Pullman’s world(s) – I loved HDM and LBS – but TSC-TRF really feel like the slightly off-kilter build-up to a climax that never arrives. Still, at least he eventually backed away from a certain very bad subplot that he had started setting up in TSC.

And then some awkward discontinuity, especially re the role of Dust and the doorways (with devastating but unremarked-upon implications for the ending of His Dark Materials). Plus the fact that the war in heaven seems to have had no discernible effects.

I think Pullman misjudged the trilogy structure. La Belle Sauvage was standalone, then TSC was book 1, TRF book 2, and some of the bare bones of book 3 were stuffed into the last 50-100 pages of TRF. The alkahest revelation, for instance, was delivered suddenly, with limited set-up and no follow-up.