Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says trader Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are faltering and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the mystery that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth ended. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding venture into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling realm he first revealed three decades past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a world whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are populated with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and beverages is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a adult: still clearly the prickly and determined heroine of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, warier, less certain. This restraint is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to depart in search of that youthful part of her which she appears to have shed (an quality which he represents as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his recently acquired power to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to find out more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly rose oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval rippling out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a marketable product, by alternate groups as a research-based or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a origin of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. 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, Lyra's actions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be inextricably connected with the destiny of the universe
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran broadly in tandem. In the conclusion, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably woven with the fate of the world. Her individual mission to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the key struggle in a wider battle with an controlling regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Philosophical Struggles
The novel opens with the discovery of a series of unusual cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that seem to give on to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The authority, with its leader at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and sets out to eradicate them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, however, her belief that these sites must be preserved – that what they stand for and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a poetic conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
