Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, Lyra's actions and her path are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell autonomy of reason, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
