Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears in some way to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger battle with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to quell freedom of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book begins with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
