Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
