Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
