Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Precisely what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which resumes where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are populated with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, transports are ridden and drinks is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then met once more as a baby in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and determined heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more cautious, less sure. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that innocent part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, encountering with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to broaden the religion's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which manifests somehow to be the source of a societal and financial crisis emanating out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial commodity, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a origin of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the realm
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her fate are unveiled to be deeply linked with the future of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her soul and regain her creativity becomes the key struggle in a wider war with an controlling government which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to quell freedom of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, rebellious ways in which people can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The book starts with the finding of a collection of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The church, with its leader at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they offer is mysteriously essential – grows. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or whatever we call it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical conflict between innocence and experience is set.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
