Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
