Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
