Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's air: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
