Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
