Tings are collapsing 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 tilted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and troubling lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from authorities, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting realm he first unveiled three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape aligns with that of our world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and tea is drunk, and older scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the prior volumes, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that childlike part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about his intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by certain groups as a tradeable good, by others as a empirical or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal journey to rejoin with her soul and recover her creativity becomes the central conflict in a larger battle with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of reason, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's atmosphere: windows that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid reason and back to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their significance and what they provide is in some way essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical struggle between innocence and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
