Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's sky: portals that look to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
