Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's final venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to 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 daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is sipped, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious main character of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears somehow to be the origin of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, Lyra's movements and her destiny are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the finding of a set of curious cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. One such window seems to be the origin of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to move from strict logic and back to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that their significance and what they offer is in some way vital – strengthens. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
