Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible 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 vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
