Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the church's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
