Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
