🔗 Share this article

Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm

In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the