🔗 Share this article

Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."

The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

Converging Storylines

The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.

Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the future of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the future of the universe. Her private mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the planet's air: portals that appear to give on to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution

At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the