🔗 Share this article

Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe

In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The story opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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