Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
