Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
