Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
