Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to broaden the church's rule. A key character, who saved young the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
