Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
