Things are falling apart in the last installment 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 slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. 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, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
