Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
