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, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
