Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
