🔗 Share this article

Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."

Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey

Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.

As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the world

In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.

Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts

The story opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Plot Rhythm and Character Development

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