Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
