Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
