Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
