Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
