Tings are falling apart in the final volume 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 charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
