Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are taken and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: portals that appear to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
