Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the unveiling of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
