Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
