Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and back to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
