Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Organizations are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel 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 draining from governments, and accumulating in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of rioters. "An element is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and solid are faltering and failing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Just what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and think and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, transports are caught and drinks is sipped, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a adult: still distinctly the prickly and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, paradoxically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to go off in pursuit of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an quality which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of austere, administrative malice – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. The antagonist – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his newfound authority to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued infant Lyra to refuge along a overflowing river as an child in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in espionage: he is dispatched to the city to discover more about Delamare's aims. And behind all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from the region. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable product, by different parties as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and whether it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.
Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's deeds, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inextricably linked with the future of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In this final book, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, her movements and her fate are shown to be deeply entwined with the future of the world. Her private quest to rejoin with her companion and rediscover her vision becomes the primary struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling system which, as such authorities always have, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel starts with the discovery of a series of unusual fissures in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the origin of the much debated rose oil. The Magisterium, with its leader at its leadership, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and endeavors to eradicate them. As our protagonist begins to move from strict reason and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between naivety and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
