Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound influence to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who carried baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
