Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and return to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
