Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
