Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, 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 innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
