Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
