Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
