Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
