Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
