Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
