Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen 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 halls of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by daemons, essences in creature form; where the air are teeming with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and tea is drunk, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the sharp and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but more mature, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – Lyra's uncle, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to expand the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by others as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in His Dark Materials, her movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her private mission to reunite with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the unveiling of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the world's air: gateways that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from inflexible logic and return to instinct, yet, her belief that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
