Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, 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". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
