Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
