Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart 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 rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
