Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the church's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
