Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
