Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, 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". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
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 ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
