Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
