Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
