Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is draining from authorities, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Precisely what that element might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which resumes where its predecessor ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the prickly and tenacious main character of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an aspect which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the catalysts of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the position of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired influence to extend the institution's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded Thames as an child in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial upheaval spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a empirical or mystical phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be destroyed. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the original trilogy, our protagonist's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inseparably connected with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran largely in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reunite with her soul and rediscover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a broader conflict with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is striving to quell freedom of reason, originality and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the structure of the planet's sky: portals that seem to give on to other worlds. One such window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its leadership, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As Lyra begins to move from inflexible rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her belief that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – strengthens. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the botanical realm, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
