Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
