Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's rule. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a series of strange openings in the structure of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these openings as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
