Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and failing."
The Central Mystery 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 its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and beverages is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from inflexible reason and revert to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
