Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
