Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
