Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the institution's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about his aims. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a marketable product, by others as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell independence of thought, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
