Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
