Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the finding of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
