Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the world. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the