Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from authorities, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Some force is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path
Precisely what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, the author's last venture into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of this world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, essences in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but below, buses are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the prickly and persistent protagonist of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the beginning, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant Lyra to safety along a flooded Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is dispatched to the city to learn more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from the region. The oil is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an affront that must be obliterated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be destroyed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they merge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her fate are unveiled to be deeply entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the key struggle in a broader conflict with an authoritarian system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to suppress independence of reason, creativity and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to give on to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a challenge to the church's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their significance and their value is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a poetic conflict between purity and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
