Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
