Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division 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 depart in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
