Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
