Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and solid are faltering and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which continues where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and determined heroine of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more cautious, more doubtful. This limitation is intensified by her separation from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which saw Lyra undertake a picaresque trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the faith's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the institution's control. A key character, who saved infant the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in spycraft: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from that area. The substance is viewed by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably linked with the fate of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her imagination becomes the central struggle in a wider war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thinking, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the discovery of a collection of strange openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that look to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her certainty that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – strengthens. "The substance, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
