Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant 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 tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
