Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra 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 its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that look to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
