Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
