Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that appears, in this volume especially, as a intense and slanted version of our own. Establishments are weakening, or reassembling themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were secure and solid are deteriorating and collapsing."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, endlessly enchanting world he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a world whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with sorceresses and mythical beasts, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is drunk, and mature scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This limitation is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in pursuit of that childlike part of the heroine which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "creativity"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering voyage across Europe and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in play, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's relative, who faults her for his family member's death – has worked himself into the role of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is intent on using his fresh power to broaden the church's control. A key character, who carried young the heroine to security along a flooded river as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the source of a social and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by various factions as a tradeable product, by alternate groups as a scientific or mystical miracle, and by yet others – the fanatical "men from the mountains" – as a wellspring of darkness; an affront that must be destroyed. The issue of its origins, what it stands for, and if it should be eliminated or protected is escalating in importance.
Like the first series, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. Similar to the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are unveiled to be inextricably linked with the future of the realm. Her personal mission to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her vision becomes the primary battleground in a broader war with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle independence of thought, creativity and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be independent.
Cosmic Openings and Ideological Conflicts
The novel begins with the unveiling of a collection of strange openings in the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere: portals that appear to lead to other worlds. One such window seems to be the source of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these windows as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and return to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and what they provide is in some way vital – increases. "The substance, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The stage for a philosophical struggle between purity and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
