Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's air: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
