Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
