Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
