Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
