Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
