Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar 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 flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger 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 may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
