Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a universe that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from states, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of corporations, the hands of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are faltering and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that animates the concluding book, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first revealed in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a world whose terrain corresponds to that of the real world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still clearly the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but aged, sadder, warier, less sure. This limitation is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an quality which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the religious controlling power, and the author's masterfully eerie embodiment of austere, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the role of head of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the church's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried infant Lyra to safety along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in intelligence work: he is sent to a key location to discover more about his intentions. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a social and financial crisis rippling out from that area. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a origin of evil; an affront that must be destroyed. The dilemma of where it comes from, its meaning, and if 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 demonstrated to be deeply entwined with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her fate are revealed to be inseparably woven with the destiny of the universe. Her personal mission to reconnect with her soul and recover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a wider war with an controlling system which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to quell independence of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story starts with the finding of a series of strange cracks in the makeup of the world's air: portals that look to give on to other worlds. An example of a portal appears to be the point of the highly contested rose oil. The church, with Delamare at its head, labels these openings as a threat to the institution's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these places must be defended – that what they stand for and their value is somehow essential – grows. "The substance, or the substance, or the imagination, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
