Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
