Tings are falling apart in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Organizations are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and troubling lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of religious leaders, the vaults of business empires, the grasp of mobs. "Something is at work, stealthily, gradually", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were secure and strong are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that animates this final volume, which continues where the previous book concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's final venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating realm he first revealed 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the humans look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in La Belle Sauvage, the introductory book with which the author began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent main character of the previous installments, but more mature, more sorrowful, more careful, less certain. This limitation is intensified by her split from her soul companion, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the cause which led him to leave her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to leave in quest of that youthful part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the driving forces of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a adventurous trek across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with wonder and peril on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in motion, and darker forces at work. The religious council – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic malice – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – the heroine's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the role of head of the church's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the church's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an young boy in La Belle Sauvage, is now an academic with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic upheaval emanating out from that area. The oil is regarded by various factions as a commercial good, by different parties as a empirical or mystical miracle, and by others still – the zealous "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the world
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they merge. As in His Dark Materials, her choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably entwined with the destiny of the realm. Her private quest to reconnect with her daemon and regain her creativity becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an controlling regime which, as such authorities typically do, is striving to suppress independence of thinking, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which people can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a collection of strange cracks in the fabric of the Earth's sky: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. One such opening seems to be the origin of the highly contested rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, classifies these windows as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As our protagonist begins to move from inflexible rationalism and back to intuition, however, her certainty that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is in some way vital – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and maturity is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
