Things are falling apart in the final volume 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 slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and return to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
