Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
