Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
