Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
