Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
