Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this 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, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, originality and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that look to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
