Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable rose oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, 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 poetic struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
