Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: windows that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
