Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's control. A key character, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
