Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, the author's final excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of our world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, transports are taken and drinks is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but aged, more sorrowful, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who saved baby the heroine to refuge along a swollen Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: 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 precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The extract is regarded by some as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Similar to the original series, her choices and her path are unveiled to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her companion and regain her imagination becomes the central conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as these systems always have, is seeking to quell independence of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual cracks in the structure of the planet's sky: gateways that look to give on to different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and revert to intuition, however, her certainty that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is in some way crucial – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
