Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and durable are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and The Protagonist's Path
Just what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor left off. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first unveiled in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the air are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a child in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to go off in search of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the church's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to find out more about his plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran broadly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the future of the realm. Her individual quest to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the central battleground in a larger conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is striving to stifle independence of reason, innovation and expression: all the personal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a collection of unusual openings in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: windows that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a window manifests to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from rigid logic and return to instinct, nevertheless, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
