Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, 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 conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
