Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
