Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last venture 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 corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
