Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her vision becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to give on to other worlds. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
