Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
