Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and think and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry luxury shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and tenacious heroine of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of her which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the role of leader of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby the heroine to security along a flooded Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and precious botanical extract which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the central struggle in a broader war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the unveiling of a set of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. One such opening appears to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its head, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
