Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
