Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of thought, originality and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
