Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
