Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
