Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
