Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
