Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted 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, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. 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 financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way 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 setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
