Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
