Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is sipped, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
