Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
