Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a window appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
