Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the cause of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the central conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, innovation and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. An example of a window seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
