Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
