Things are falling apart in the last installment of The Dust Trilogy, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along new and troubling lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and accumulating in the chambers of theocrats, the treasuries of business empires, the control of crowds. "Some force is at work, stealthily, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and strong are faltering and giving way."
Core Enigma and Lyra's Journey
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the elaborately built, deeply captivating realm he first unveiled in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a domain whose landscape aligns with that of the real world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are paired by external spirits, essences in beast form; where the skies are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but beneath those skies, transports are caught and beverages is consumed, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a 12-year-old in the original trilogy, and then revisited as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began the series, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the sharp and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but older, more sorrowful, warier, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pan – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to depart in pursuit of that youthful part of the heroine which she seems to have lost (an trait which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, underlying forces were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister incarnation of rigid, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Marcel Delamare – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sibling's death – has worked himself into the office of leader of the Magisterium's governing body, and is set on using his newfound influence to extend the church's dominium. A key character, who carried young Lyra to safety along a flooded river as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an academic with a additional duty in spycraft: he is dispatched to a key location to learn more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears in some way to be the source of a social and economic disturbance spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is viewed by various factions as a commercial product, by others as a research-based or esoteric miracle, and by yet others – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a source of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of where it comes from, what it stands for, and whether it should be removed or protected is becoming urgent.
Like His Dark Materials, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are demonstrated to be deeply linked with the destiny of the realm
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. As in the first trilogy, Lyra's movements and her destiny are revealed to be deeply woven with the future of the world. Her personal journey to reconnect with her companion and rediscover her imagination becomes the key battleground in a larger war with an controlling government which, as such regimes often attempt, is seeking to stifle freedom of thinking, originality and culture: all the internal, rebellious ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Philosophical Struggles
The story starts with the unveiling of a set of strange fissures in the structure of the Earth's air: windows that appear to lead to different dimensions. One such window appears to be the origin of the much debated mystical extract. The church, with its leader at its helm, labels these portals as a problem to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to turn away from inflexible reason and back to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these places must be defended – that their significance and what they offer is somehow crucial – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between naivety and experience is established.
Narrative Pacing and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
