Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
