Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reunite with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
