Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Authority is shifting from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, according to many, the author's final venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, beings in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and tea is consumed, and middle-aged scholars carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the original trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and determined main character of the previous installments, but aged, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This restraint is amplified by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of austere, procedural malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is intent on using his recently acquired authority to expand the institution's dominium. Another protagonist, who carried baby Lyra to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about Delamare's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is viewed by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are demonstrated to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the universe
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's choices and her fate are revealed to be deeply woven with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of thought, creativity and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. One such portal seems to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, labels these windows as a challenge to the institution's doctrine and endeavors to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, however, her conviction that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow vital – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
