Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
