Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that look to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
