Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
