Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
