Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
