Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This restraint is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's High Council, and is set on using his newfound power to extend the religion's dominium. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to security along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
