Rose Field Chronicles: Pullman's Gripping Finale to the His Dark Materials Trilogy
Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. A key character, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book opens with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the fabric of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. One such window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its helm, designates these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
