Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
