Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", 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 durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
