Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the finding of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
