Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but below, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, her choices and her path are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
