Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
