Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid 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 drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
