Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in creature form; where the air are filled with witches and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, warier, less sure. This restraint is amplified 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.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh influence to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and economic disturbance emanating out from that area. The oil is seen by some as a marketable product, by different parties as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her path are unveiled to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems always have, is attempting to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a problem to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible reason and return to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that what they stand for and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
