Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is regarded by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
