Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
