Tings are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, 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 series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: portals that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these openings as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
