Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which seems in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of reason, innovation and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: gateways that appear to lead to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these openings as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
