Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
