Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
