Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl 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 adult: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who saved young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
