Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
