Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by daemons, essences in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the faith's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by some as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her destiny are shown to be deeply woven with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of reason, originality and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's air: windows that seem to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The authority, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
