Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split 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 go off in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
