Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
