Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the world's air: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
