Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and older professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the spiky and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of strict, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to expand the church's control. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to security along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the future of the world. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the central battleground in a larger battle with an controlling system which, as these systems always have, is striving to quell autonomy of reason, innovation and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the Earth's sky: gateways that seem to open into other worlds. One such window appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
