Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: 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 valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
