Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's air: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
