Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
