Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and drinks is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the religion's rule. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about his plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. An example of a opening seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
