Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
