Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the