Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first 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 mature individual: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, bureaucratic evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thought, creativity and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book begins with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that look to open into different dimensions. A particular window appears to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
