Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
