Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
