Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden 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 chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
