Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, 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 the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
