Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from authorities, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the grasp of crowds. "Some force is at work, silently, very subtly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the ancient paths from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are faltering and giving way."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where its predecessor concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last excursion into the intricately constructed, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of our world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, buses are taken and tea is sipped, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and determined main character of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she may have forgotten (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, deeper currents were in play, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's governing authority, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the church's governing body, and is determined on using his newfound power to expand the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who rescued baby the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The substance is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the original trilogy, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in parallel. In the conclusion, they come together. Like the first trilogy, her movements and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the universe. Her private mission to rejoin with her daemon and recover her imagination becomes the primary struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thought, originality and art: all the personal, defiant ways in which individuals can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the discovery of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the Earth's air: windows that look to open into different dimensions. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the fiercely disputed botanical substance. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, designates these openings as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and maturity is established.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
