Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare'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 origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
