🔗 Share this article

Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen 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 pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."

The Central Mystery and Her Quest

Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is set.

Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth

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