Things 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 seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
