Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story begins with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
