Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
