Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
