Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives this final volume, which continues where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the skies are filled with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and financial disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her daemon and regain her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel starts with the discovery of a collection of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. One such window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these portals as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and return to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and knowledge is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
