Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
