Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
