Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Some force is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in animal form; where the heavens are filled with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is sipped, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious rose oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by others as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
