Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths 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 question that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the world's air: windows that look to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
