Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
