Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
