Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to the city to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell autonomy of reason, originality and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's sky: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
