Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, very subtly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which resumes where the previous book ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and tea is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less sure. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of head of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from the region. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is attempting to quell independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to open into other worlds. One such opening manifests to be the point of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and back to feeling, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic struggle between purity and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
