Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or reorganizing themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, very subtly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were stable and durable are deteriorating and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last foray into the elaborately built, deeply captivating world he first introduced three decades past, with the publication of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the people look and reason and behave like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the air are populated with enchantresses and gryphons, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged professors carry luxury shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still recognisably the sharp and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a adventurous journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in play, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the church's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's rule. A key character, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a flooded river as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and costly rose oil which manifests in some way to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The oil is seen by some as a commercial commodity, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual phenomenon, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of evil; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of its source, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or preserved is becoming urgent.
Like the first series, our protagonist's actions, and her destiny, are demonstrated to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran largely in side by side. In this final book, they merge. Similar to the first trilogy, her movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably linked with the fate of the world. Her personal quest to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central battleground in a broader conflict with an authoritarian government which, as such regimes always have, is seeking to stifle autonomy of thought, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The novel begins with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that look to open into different dimensions. A particular opening appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its leadership, designates these portals as a problem to the religion's beliefs and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid logic and revert to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these locations must be defended – that their meaning and what they provide is mysteriously crucial – increases. "Dust, or the extract, or the creativity, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a poetic conflict between innocence and knowledge is prepared.
Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
