Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
