Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
