Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
