Things are falling apart in the final volume 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 skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks 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 saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
