Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
