Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
