Tings 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 manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
