Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
