Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
