Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, 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 previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
