Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the church's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities typically do, is attempting to quell autonomy of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. One such portal seems to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
