Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting 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 governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about Delamare's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her fate are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to open into other worlds. An example of a opening appears to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
