Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
