Tings are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are taken and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, bureaucratic wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh influence to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. Like the original series, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
