Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
