Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an oppressive government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that look to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
