Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that appear to open into other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
