Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
