Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met 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 this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
