Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of unusual fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
