Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements 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 beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
