Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of mobs. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which manifests somehow to be the origin of a social and economic upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, Lyra's deeds, and her fate, are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the realm. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and recover her creativity becomes the key battleground in a broader war with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to stifle freedom of thought, innovation and expression: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book opens with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to give on to other worlds. One such window manifests to be the point of the much debated mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, classifies these windows as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
