Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, 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 leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
