Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The oil is seen by certain groups as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the finding of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. One such opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
