Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's 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 societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
