Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted 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, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
