Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
