Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
