Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
