Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that manifests, now more than ever, as a intense and tilted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and troubling lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that animates the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, according to many, the author's last excursion into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography aligns with that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in animal form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her division from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to leave in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the religious ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's control. A key character, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by others as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Like the original trilogy, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel opens with the unveiling of a set of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these sites must be protected – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or whatever we call it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a poetic tussle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
