Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
