Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
