Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
