Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
