Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
