Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
