Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
