Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
