Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
