Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
