Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
