Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
