Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
