Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are ridden and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved young Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the structure of the world's air: portals that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a window appears to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
