Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
