Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, yet, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
