Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
