Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. 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
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
