Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
