Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
