Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics 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 Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
