Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
