Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
