Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to the original series, her actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such authorities always have, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story opens with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid logic and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
