Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the coffers of corporations, the grasp of crowds. "Something is at work, silently, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in creature form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but more mature, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that childlike part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the institution's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is dispatched to Geneva to find out more about his aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric phenomenon, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a origin of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and whether it should be removed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the original trilogy, Lyra's deeds, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a larger battle with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel starts with the discovery of a set of strange fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: portals that look to lead to alternate realities. A particular portal manifests to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its leadership, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to turn away from rigid logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is in some way crucial – strengthens. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and knowledge is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
