Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, 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 struggle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
