Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels The Rose Field, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a broader battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a opening manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and return to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
