Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
