Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
