Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, her actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
