Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
