Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
