Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
