Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening 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 this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
