Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: portals that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
