Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
