Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, 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 chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a broader battle with an oppressive system which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and return to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
