Tings are collapsing 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. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
