Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
