Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The substance is seen by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her private journey to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a collection of curious fissures in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a threat to the church's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
