Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of reason, originality and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the planet's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
