Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader battle with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
