Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses 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 introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
