Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which seems somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of thought, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the discovery of a collection of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
