Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement 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 the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
