Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and revert to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the