Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the world's air: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
