Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers 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 asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
