Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
