Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
