Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound power to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As the heroine 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 what they provide is mysteriously crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
