Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
