Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe 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 past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
