Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation 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 depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
