Tings are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, in this volume especially, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and accumulating in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and durable are deteriorating and failing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where its predecessor ended. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past tacks and jibes with ours; where the people look and reason and act like us, but are joined by animal souls, beings in beast form; where the heavens are filled with witches and legendary creatures, but below, buses are taken and drinks is drunk, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the prequel, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still recognisably the prickly and persistent heroine of the prior volumes, but more mature, more sorrowful, warier, less certain. This restraint is intensified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that childlike part of her which she appears to have shed (an trait which he represents as her "imagination"), and her quest to reconnect with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a adventurous voyage across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in motion, and malevolent elements at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, administrative evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's uncle, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to refuge along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious botanical extract which manifests in some way to be the cause of a social and economic crisis emanating out from Central Asia. The substance is seen by certain groups as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its origins, what it stands for, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, our protagonist's deeds, and her fate, are revealed to be inextricably linked with the destiny of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her fate are revealed to be inextricably woven with the destiny of the world. Her individual quest to rejoin with her daemon and recover her vision becomes the key struggle in a broader war with an oppressive system which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress freedom of thinking, innovation and expression: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The book begins with the discovery of a set of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to other worlds. An example of a opening manifests to be the origin of the much debated botanical substance. The authority, with Delamare at its head, labels these portals as a challenge to the institution's orthodoxy and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to move from rigid reason and revert to intuition, however, her belief that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is somehow essential – increases. "The substance, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between naivety and knowledge is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
