🔗 Share this article

Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."

Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey

Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to safety along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.

As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm

In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles

The book opens with the unveiling of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to other worlds. A particular portal appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these portals as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.

Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the