Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
