Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are taken and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: portals that appear to open into other worlds. A particular portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
