Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
