Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing 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". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
