Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's air: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
