Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
