Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
