Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
