Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
