Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the structure of the world's air: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, classifies these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, yet, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
