Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
