Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
