Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain aligns with that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound power to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of curious cracks in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and back to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
