Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
