Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her personal journey to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
