Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of business empires, the control of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a trader character, keeping a vigilant eye on the trade routes from his seat in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are deteriorating and failing."
Key Puzzle and The Protagonist's Path
Exactly what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, reportedly, Pullman's concluding excursion into the elaborately built, deeply captivating universe he first introduced three decades past, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a world whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose past veers and changes with ours; where the people appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by daemons, souls in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, vehicles are caught and tea is consumed, and older academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still clearly the prickly and determined protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is heightened by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Converging Storylines
His choice to go off in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a wandering voyage across the continent and into the mountain region, encountering with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's controlling power, and the author's deliciously chilling incarnation of austere, bureaucratic evil – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – Lyra's uncle, who faults her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of head of the authority's governing body, and is set on using his newfound authority to broaden the church's control. Malcolm Polstead, who rescued baby Lyra to security along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is dispatched to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which seems somehow to be the source of a societal and financial disturbance emanating out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by various factions as a commercial product, by different parties as a scientific or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be removed or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her fate, are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm
In its predecessor, these plots ran broadly in side by side. In the conclusion, they merge. Like the first trilogy, the protagonist's choices and her fate are shown to be inseparably linked with the destiny of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her soul and rediscover her vision becomes the key battleground in a larger conflict with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is attempting to stifle autonomy of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The story starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's doctrine and aims to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – grows. "Dust, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical struggle between naivety and maturity is set.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
