Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
