Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
