Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
