Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
