🔗 Share this article

Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new 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 draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.

Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe

In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the