Tings are collapsing 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 slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
