Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original 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 mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
