Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified 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.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
