Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
