Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the church's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
