Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
