Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
