🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the concluding book 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 reassembling 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". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story starts with the finding of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the