Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's control. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her vision becomes the central battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that appear to give on to other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
