Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
