Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
