Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
