Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal mission to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
