Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
