Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to discover more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her path are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a threat to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and revert to instinct, yet, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
