Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
