Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound influence to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which appears somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an oppressive government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: windows that look to open into other worlds. One such opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible reason and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their significance and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
