Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp 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 place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's air: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
