Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which seems in some way to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her movements and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
