Things are falling apart in the concluding book 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 charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a set of curious openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
