Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
