Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
