Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's control. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central battleground in a wider war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress freedom of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the structure of the planet's air: gateways that look to give on to other worlds. A particular opening appears to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is somehow vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
