Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
