Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
