Tings 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, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
