Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
