Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
