Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and durable are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but below, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to leave in quest of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen river as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the world. Her personal quest to reunite with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger conflict with an oppressive government which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story starts with the discovery of a series of curious fissures in the structure of the world's sky: windows that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these windows as a challenge to the institution's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible reason and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
