Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman’s magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force “is destroying the air and the seasons”; at the same time, “money’s going bad, and no one knows why”. Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. “Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly”, says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. “Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It’s a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
