Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on 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 accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
