Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
