Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, her actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
