Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
