Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound influence to broaden the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved baby Lyra to refuge 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 Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's sky: gateways that look to open into other worlds. A particular opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
