Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
