Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified 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
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
