Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, buses are caught and beverages is drunk, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his newfound power to expand the religion's control. A key character, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her individual journey to rejoin with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the central conflict in a broader war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is striving to suppress independence of thought, innovation and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the discovery of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's air: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and back to intuition, yet, her belief that these sites must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
