Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her personal mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
