Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, 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 tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to instinct, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
