Things are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and pooling in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of conglomerates, the control of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in beast form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and older professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of austere, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved young Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial disturbance rippling out from that area. The oil is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, her choices and her fate are shown to be deeply linked with the destiny of the world. Her individual mission to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key conflict in a broader battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, originality and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the discovery of a series of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's air: windows that seem to give on to alternate realities. One such portal seems to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the institution's doctrine and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a poetic tussle between purity and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
