Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
