Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular opening seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
