Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and drinks is drunk, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's choices and her destiny are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
