Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. A particular window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
