Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
