Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
