Things are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the second of Philip Pullman's magisterial trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reassembling themselves along novel and disquieting lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from states, and pooling in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of mobs. "An element is at work, very quietly, gradually", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a observant eye on the Silk Roads from his post in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were stable and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman's last excursion into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting realm he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose landscape maps on to that of this world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans appear and think and behave like us, but are accompanied by animal souls, essences in beast form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and legendary creatures, but below, transports are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first encountered as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began the series, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, more sorrowful, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her division from her animal guide, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
His choice to depart in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an trait which he represents as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the religious ruling body, and the author's deliciously chilling embodiment of austere, procedural evil – is under new leadership, and showing its strength. Lyra's uncle – Lyra's relative, who blames her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's control. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to security along a swollen Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a secondary role in spycraft: he is assigned to the city to find out more about the antagonist's aims. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and precious essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the source of a societal and economic disturbance rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by some as a commercial good, by different parties as a scientific or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the extremist "men from the mountains" – as a origin of malevolence; an insult that must be eradicated. The question of its source, its significance, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe
In its predecessor, these storylines ran largely in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her choices and her path are revealed to be deeply linked with the fate of the realm. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and rediscover her imagination becomes the primary battleground in a wider conflict with an oppressive regime which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to stifle autonomy of reason, creativity and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which people can be free.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The novel begins with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that appear to open into alternate realities. One such portal manifests to be the point of the much debated rose oil. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these openings as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from inflexible logic and return to intuition, however, her belief that these places must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is in some way essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or rose oil, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a philosophical conflict between innocence and maturity is set.
Story Tempo and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
