Things are collapsing in the concluding book of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
