Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – 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 pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
