Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
