Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the skies are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are caught and tea is sipped, and older professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that childlike part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the origin of a social and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her path are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal quest to reunite with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the structure of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the source of the highly contested mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its head, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and return to feeling, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Dust, 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 philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
