Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
