Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
