Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are caught and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
