Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and failing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and tea is sipped, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to expand the religion's rule. A key character, who carried infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a tradeable good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her private quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: portals that look to lead to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
