Things are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure 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 inquiry that animates this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in animal form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The substance is regarded by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a series of curious openings in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their significance and what they offer is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
