Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered 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 the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
