Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
