Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved young the heroine to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
