Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
