Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
