Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
