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 seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
