Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
