Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
