Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
