Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the future of the universe. Her individual mission to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell autonomy of thought, originality and culture: all the personal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from rigid reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
