Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
