Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
