Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell independence of reason, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and return to instinct, yet, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
