Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
