Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
