Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
