Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
