Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the church's rule. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
