Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
