Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
