Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
