Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
