Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the religion's control. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that appear to open into other worlds. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
