Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from governments, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and strong are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the skies are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to expand the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in espionage: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are shown to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In this final book, they merge. As in the original series, Lyra's choices and her path are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from strict reason and return to intuition, yet, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical tussle between innocence and experience is established.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
