Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
