Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
