Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who saved young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
