Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from states, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the coffers of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but more mature, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This limitation is intensified by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his recently acquired power to extend the institution's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable commodity, by others as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in the first trilogy, her choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to quell independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, resistant ways in which people can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to give on to different dimensions. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, designates these windows as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and revert to feeling, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way crucial – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a philosophical tussle between innocence and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
