Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
