Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a realm that seems, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are faltering and failing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is heightened by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired influence to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by yet others – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they come together. Similar to the first trilogy, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a broader battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into different dimensions. An example of a portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the institution's beliefs and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid reason and back to feeling, yet, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
