Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
