Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
