Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
