Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
