Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
