Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
