Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
