Tings 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, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell independence of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
