Things are unraveling 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 charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
