Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
