Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods 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 prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
