Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
