Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes 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 filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
