Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just 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, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the