Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. 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.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the church's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about his aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to quell independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that look to lead to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
