Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
