Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
