Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Exactly what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met 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 the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to the original series, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of reason, creativity and art: all the inner, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the finding of a set of unusual openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these openings as a threat to the religion's orthodoxy and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict rationalism and return to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
