Tings are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
