Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
