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 appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's air: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
