Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and mythical beasts, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
