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, in this volume especially, as a intense and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of corporations, the control of rioters. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and solid are weakening and collapsing."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the question that animates the concluding book, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first revealed 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in creature form; where the air are filled with enchantresses and gryphons, but below, transports are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and tenacious main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her journey to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's masterfully eerie incarnation of strict, bureaucratic wickedness – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to broaden the church's dominium. Malcolm Polstead, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a flooded river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about Delamare's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a commercial product, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be obliterated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe
In the previous volume, these plots ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her path are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes typically do, is attempting to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles
The story begins with the unveiling of a collection of curious openings in the makeup of the world's atmosphere: gateways that appear to lead to other worlds. One such opening appears to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with its leader at its head, designates these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and return to intuition, yet, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and their value is mysteriously essential – grows. "The substance, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between innocence and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
