Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
