Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
