Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar 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 states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the