Tings are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a realm that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reorganizing themselves along new and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is ruining the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is draining from states, and gathering in the chambers of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the grasp of rioters. "Something is at work, very quietly, gradually", says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the trade routes from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were stable and durable are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Precisely what that force might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's final foray into the carefully crafted, infinitely beguiling realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the humans appear and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, beings in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are caught and beverages is sipped, and older academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and persistent heroine of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, less sure. This circumscription is intensified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which led him to leave her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
His choice to depart in search of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled the protagonist undertake a adventurous voyage across the continent and into the Caucasus, facing with marvel and danger on the way. But from the outset, profound shifts were in action, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's deliciously chilling embodiment of rigid, administrative wickedness – is under new leadership, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – our protagonist's uncle, who blames her for his family member's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of leader of the authority's High Council, and is determined on using his fresh authority to extend the religion's rule. Another protagonist, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in La Belle Sauvage, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is assigned to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and valuable botanical extract which seems somehow to be the origin of a societal and financial crisis rippling out from the region. The extract is seen by certain groups as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a empirical or mystical wonder, and by yet others – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a source of malevolence; an insult that must be obliterated. The issue of where it comes from, its meaning, and whether it should be eliminated or preserved is coming rapidly to the fore.
Like the original trilogy, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply connected with the fate of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in tandem. In the conclusion, they come together. As in the original series, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are unveiled to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reunite with her soul and recover her vision becomes the key battleground in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such regimes typically do, is striving to suppress autonomy of thought, creativity and expression: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the makeup of the planet's sky: gateways that look to open into alternate realities. A particular portal appears to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The church, with Delamare at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and sets out to eliminate them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible logic and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be protected – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we call it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a Blakean tussle between innocence and knowledge is set.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
