Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike 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 catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
