Tings are unraveling in the concluding book of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that seems, here more than ever, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and accumulating in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, imperceptibly", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which resumes where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are taken and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a child in the first trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her split from her soul companion, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to go off in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, encountering with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of strict, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who faults her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the role of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his recently acquired authority to extend the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved baby Lyra to safety along a overflowing 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 discover more about his intentions. And behind all of this is the mystery surrounding the rare and valuable rose oil which appears in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by others as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by yet others – the extremist "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an affront that must be eradicated. The issue of its origins, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In this final book, they converge. Like the original series, Lyra's movements and her path are shown to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the realm. Her individual quest to reunite with her companion and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as these systems always have, is seeking to suppress autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the planet's atmosphere: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular opening manifests to be the source of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these windows as a problem to the religion's beliefs and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the creativity, or the botanical realm, or no matter what we call it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic tussle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
