Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible 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 authority to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, her actions and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
