Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
