Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
