Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
