Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
