Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, 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 controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that look to open into other worlds. An example of a opening seems to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a challenge to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and return to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between innocence and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
