Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into other worlds. An example of a portal seems to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and back to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
