Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
