Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and their value is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
