Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified 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.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
