Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
