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, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
