Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her private mission to reconnect with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's air: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
