Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible reason and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
