Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding excursion into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and determined main character of the earlier books, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in search of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in espionage: he is sent to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a larger war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to other worlds. One such window appears to be the source of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these openings as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict logic and return to feeling, however, her conviction that these sites must be preserved – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
