Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
