Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to learn more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
