Review: The Rose Field. Philip Pullman, Book of Dust volume 3

WARNING: PLOT DISCUSSION — MILDY SPOILERY

The long trek across the world is almost complete. After six years, the Book of Dust reaches its conclusion. In the world outside, the conditions that informed the earlier volumes (which I wrote about in 2017, and 2019) have, if anything, only concentrated some of the intensity of what was he was writing before, and has hardened the steel of Pullman’s narrative, and central vision.

At the end of The Secret Commonwealth, we left Lyra at the gates of al-Khan al-Azraq, the City of the Moon¹. Her journey to that point has been distressing and violent, which left us in no doubt that this trilogy is straying into far more murky adult waters that what came before. Actually, one feature about this book is that its exploration of emotional turbulence is explored in some detail. The Lyra we follow is still, in many senses, very young, though she’s been through a lot. In some ways she is extremely worldly, but in some ways she very much is not². Others notice a melancholy about her. Her attachments other than Will have seemingly been fleeting and superficial, and you might think (not unreasonably) that there’s still a very raw grief just below the surface that is manifesting itself in a number of ways. What is clear is that her feelings for Malcolm have evolved a great deal in that time too, to be deconstructed later on a little.

But, lest you think the whole book is just an emotional exploration, the action does kick off again fairly quickly. Almost as soon as she gets to the City she has to rescue a child’s daemon³, and as a consequence sees at least part of her altheiometer, and an assailant she encounters, carried off by a gryphon. She heads on towards Aleppo, and a meeting with a trader, Mustafa Bey, with her guide Abdel Ionides⁴. She is diverted in her travels after an encounter with a singular woman whose identity and motives only become clearer later.

We join Malcolm lying injured in a hospital, having escaped being ambushed in the New Danish Consulate in Smyrna. He is taken away to safety by an Oakley Street contact, before heading to towards Aleppo where he (rightly as it turns out) believes Lyra is heading. It takes him a while to get there, as he too is diverted – by gryphons.

Marcel Delamare has assumed his position as the President of the High Council of a now unified Magisterium, but this appears to be only a small part of his greater goal, if his early meetings with some other parties from further east are to be believed. He assembles an army to march east towards Karamakan, seemingly intent on destroying the mysterious great red building, and what lies within it.

While all this is happening, Olivier Bonneville is still on Lyra’s trail, but having crossed Delamare, things are complicated by the new supreme head of the Magisterium catching up with him and holding him not so much as a prisoner but as a tied labourer, hoping to use the young man’s developing ability to read the aleithiometer further using his new method.

Alice Lonsdale, having been arrested, manages to break out of her detention and going on the run. She heads back towards Oxford and some familiar faces. When she does, she is eventually tasked with acting as a courier for the rearguard of a now officially disbanded Oakley Street, passing a message to another contact, before dropping into cover as a chambermaid at the Savoy in London, where an old college colleague finds her a job. All of this is set against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian government; more restrictive laws come into force in Brytain, as it aligns itself with Delamare’s military campaign to move east.

These are the threads that we pick up, and which become increasingly entwined as the story continues as Malcolm and Lyra both trying to make their way to the red building that is the source of the mysterious (and increasingly rare) rose oil that has interested so many people. What does become apparent is that the windows we thought had been closed at the end of His Dark Materials have not all been: there are still many open winodws. Not only that, but the reasons Lyra and Will were given for closing them were not entirely accurate. The effects of the Rusakov field are manifold, and complex, and even the angels cannot entirely understand its power or meaning, because they don’t fully understand what it is to be human⁵.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the key theme of this trilogy is about the ongoing battle between the forces of authoritarianism, and the freedom of the spirit and the mind. Almost the whole of this series (including His Dark Materials before this) has focused on this struggle in one way or another, but in the Book of Dust it has increasingly widened to show us the world not through the eyes of those taking their first steps into adulthood, but our own. All of this is given a wider perspective as we open this out to the effects of the creeping of authoritarian thinking into wider society, and the consequences it has for all of us as human beings.

We can see around us the poisonous influence of corporate power and the continuing mindset of rapacious neo-liberal economics and marketisation, where the only value something has is how much profit it can be mined for. With the major US tech companies cosying up to a government that can now only be described as rapidly emerging fascism, in their craven acts of self-preservation, we also see what that is coming mean for other governments, and for the rest of us. We see a culture that measures value only in purely economic and financial terms, and where the value of human creativity and agency are being constantly battered by exploitation and the push to an automation principally designed to enrich those same companies and their investors⁶.

In the novel these real-world concerns have an analogue in the expanding roles of both the Magisterium, and the company Thuringia Potash, first mentioned in Volume 2. As events unfold, we learn about its increasing reach, ties to the Magisterium’s operations, and its relationship to the actions of the so-called ‘men from the mountains’. An alliance between the witches of the north, and the gryphons is brokered as we are told that they are all noticing the very air itself is changing around them⁷, and they have strong suspicions about who is responsible for this. We see the malign influence of corporate power extending even into Jordan College, as we are reminded its new Master, Hammond, is a TP man⁸:

Lyra thought of Jordan College, and its new Master Dr Hammand, once of Thuringia Potash himself, and probably still involved with it. how long beofre it would be Thuringia Potash College?
(p574)

Pullman is simply documenting the same political processes we see around us in Lyra’s world, perhaps even snaking its tendrils out toward others, draining people of their spirit, and their will to think or feel properly for themselves, driven by another motive. None of this is tremendously subtle of course, but seemingly the time for subtlety in our culture is long past for far too many people. It’s an excoriating and angry in parts as it is lyrical and heartfelt in others, and all the better for it, because all of that corruption is not inevitable: these things must be fought against.

All through this book, the word alkahest is mentioned, and it is finally Lyra who comes to realise what it truly means, and what consequences its presence has for her world and its institutions and people. But in the end, this book is notable less for what it resolves than for what it doesn’t. Lyra gets a happy ending of sorts, but there are not many easy answers and few (if any) neat endings tied up with a pretty bow to make the reader easily satisfied. In fact, some of the biggest questions get no resolution at all, because as yet there are none to be had.

As in Lyra’s world, we find ourselves in the worst of times, but another way is possible. We just have to want it enough.

¹ A neat and probably not coincidental counterpoint to His Dark Materials’ Cittagazze, the City of Magpies (which was probably also a poetic riffing on Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra to make it a the city of thieves).

² Part of this is, I think, for reasons of exposition. There are times where Lyra appears not to understand something you’d perhaps expect her to, and it feels like this is being done to walk the reader through some detail of that world we need to know. It’s not a complaint though.

³ No more is made of this child’s identity explicitly, but she appears to be the younger sister of the girl Lyra comforted during the ferry crash earlier in her journey east.

⁴ Who turns out to have many names, an interesting past, and one extremely interesting acquaintance…

⁵ This stems from a pivotal conversation Lyra has on the deck of a ferry from Baku with what we are led to believe is an angel (p321)

⁶ The obvious real world parallels are the precarity of the gig economy, minimum wage culture, and the major tech companies pushing generative AI at seemingly every single one of their products, inter alia.

⁷ Clearly an analogy for anthropogenic climate change in our own.

⁸ Who was more than happy to throw Alice to the wolves of the CCD in Volume 2