Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
