Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
