Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the planet's air: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
