Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
