Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
