Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
