Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
