Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
