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, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
