Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted 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"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
