Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to 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 The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a collection of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. One such portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
