Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
