Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the air are teeming with witches and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, buses are ridden and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is regarded by various factions as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the fate of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its head, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
