Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and drinks is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but older, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an quality which he represents as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative malice – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of leader of the church's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant the heroine to refuge along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests in some way to be the source of a social and financial upheaval rippling out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by others still – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes always have, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, creativity and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to give on to alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these portals as a problem to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to feeling, yet, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they provide is somehow crucial – grows. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a philosophical conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
