Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the air are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the sharp and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the church's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and costly rose oil which appears in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is viewed by some as a marketable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to reunite with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes always have, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and expression: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the fabric of the planet's air: gateways that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular window manifests to be the origin of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
