Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in creature form; where the skies are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, bureaucratic malice – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and valuable essential oil which appears somehow to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its meaning, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual journey to rejoin with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the primary battleground in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The book begins with the unveiling of a series of curious openings in the makeup of the world's air: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from rigid rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
