Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, 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". Authority is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
