Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine 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 its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
