Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
