Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
