Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
