Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular window appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
