Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
