Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
