Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply woven with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to instinct, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
