Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary conflict in a larger conflict with an oppressive system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
