Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
