Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from authorities, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a world whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but more mature, melancholic, warier, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in quest of that youthful part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the church's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these plots ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the primary conflict in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as these systems typically do, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's sky: windows that appear to open into alternate realities. An example of a portal appears to be the source of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
