Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, originality and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
