Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and beverages is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried infant Lyra to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, her choices and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
