Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are caught and drinks is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is regarded by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the universe. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a larger war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that appear to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
