Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the church's control. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
