Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's rule. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that look to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
