Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
