Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
